12/29/15 New York Post: “From NYC to Harvard: the war on Asian success”
by Betsy McCaughey
The outrage is that instead of embracing the example of these Asian families, school authorities and non-Asian parents want to rig the system to hold them back. It’s happening here in New York City, in suburban New Jersey and across the nation.http://nypost.com/2015/12/29/from-nyc-to-harvard-the-war-on-asian-success/

12/23/15 New York Times: “Ignoring Asian-Americans”
To the Editor:
Re “Diversity Makes You Brighter,” by Sheen S. Levine (Op-Ed, Dec. 9):
Glaringly absent from an otherwise excellent study are Asian-Americans. Even after a couple of centuries of being here, Asian-Americans are too often missing from the dialogue on diversity in the United States.

12/8/15 Portland, OR Statesman Journal : “Nakamoto is 1st Asian-American on Oregon Supreme Court”
by Gordon Friedman
SALEM, Ore. — Oregon Court of Appeals Judge Lynn R. Nakamoto has been appointed to the Oregon Supreme Court by Gov. Kate Brown. Nakamoto is replacing Justice Virginia L. Linder, who has retired.
Nakamoto is the first Asian Pacific American to sit on the state’s highest bench. Judge Roger J. DeHoog, a Deschutes County Circuit Court judge, will fill Nakamoto’s vacancy at the court of appeals.http://www.kgw.com/story/news/2015/12/08/nakamoto-1st-asian-american-oregon-supreme-court/76976564/

11/25/15 Walla Walla, WA Union-Bulletin: “Letter – Asian-Americans are a minority rarely mentioned”
There’s a lot of talk about race in the news.
I would like to ask an interesting question: Why is it that Asians are left out of most of the comparisons when race is the topic?
In the early 1990s, Jesse Jackson conveniently left Asians out of his “Rainbow Push Coalition” speeches. Why?
The answer is Asians were dropped from the comparisons because 20 years ago, Asians surpassed whites in household income, bachelor’s degrees and employment.
The media, politicians and academia would have to explain to everyone why Asian households, a racial minority group, are making $64,000 and whites only $55,000 (2010 census). They would have to explain why 50 percent of Asians have bachelor’s degrees while only 29 percent of whites do (2010 census), and why the unemployment rate for Asians is 5.7 percent and for whites it’s 6.8 percent.
Since Asians are a minority group that hasn’t been given many special privileges (if any), they would have to explain it outside of race.
If they did investigate, they would find the Asian culture puts family (Asians have the lowest out-of-wedlock birthrate at 17 percent, 41 percent lower than whites), education, entrepreneurship, saving and investment at the top of their priorities and that’s what made them the most financially successful group of people for the past 20 years.
Just as an example of many, back in the 1980s I knew a first-grade teacher. She told me Asian grandparents would sit-in on her classes because they wanted to learn English so they could be involved in their grandchild’s education, and because they knew in a country where English was spoken, fluency in English was essential.
When it came to education and income, Asians got past the race issue decades ago.
The media, politicians and academia don’t want to admit a racial minority group actually surpassed whites in education and income a long time ago because it would patently show America is about equal opportunity regardless of race.
If you want to be successful in America regardless of race, follow the lead of the most financially successful group of people in the 21st century, the Asian-American community, by making family, education, entrepreneurship, savings and investment your top priorities.
Now that I think about it, that involves hard work, it would be much easier to simply elect politicians who will give stuff away for free.
Richard Strozinsky
Walla Wallahttp://union-bulletin.com/news/2015/nov/26/letter-asian-americans-are-minority-rarely-mention/

11/23/15 press release: “U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Requests Department of Justice Investigation Into Recent Questionable Prosecution of Chinese American Scientists”
Washington, /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, by majority vote, has issued a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch concerning targeting of Chinese American scientists for alleged spying and espionage. The Commission’s letter expresses concern that the government may be failing to exercise sufficient due diligence when targeting Chinese Americans. The Commission letter requests that the Department of Justice increase training and oversight in ongoing and future investigations and prosecutions.
According to a recent article in Science magazine, in the past year, five Chinese-born scientists have been accused of trade secret theft or economic espionage, only for the federal government to drop the charges after recognizing mistakes and insufficient or nonexistent evidence. In the case of Temple University professor Xi Xiaoxing, prosecutors arrested Dr. Xi for sharing confidential laboratory equipment schematics but dropped the charges after scientists informed the government the plans he shared were for a different technology. Although charges were dropped, the accused were left with tarnished reputations and legal bills to pay.
These prosecutions have harmed the individual scientists and their families and caused concern in the Asian American community about unfair treatment and racial profiling.
Commission Chairman Martin R. Castro on behalf of a majority of the Commission stated, “While combating spying and economic espionage is vital to our national security, just as important are the protections of our civil rights and civil liberties. American citizens are entitled to due process and should not be targeted on the basis of their race or ethnicity—that is un-American.”
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is an independent, bipartisan agency charged with advising the President and Congress on civil rights matters and issuing a federal civil rights enforcement report. For information about Commission’s reports and meetings, visit http://www.usccr.gov.http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/updated-us-commission-on-civil-rights-requests-department-of-justice-investigation-into-recent-questionable-prosecution-of-chinese-american-scientists-300183205.html

11/19/15 Vice News: “Why Does the FBI Keep Arresting Asian-American Scientists?”
By Avi Asher-Schapiro
Last May, Dr. Xiaoxing Xi awoke to find a team of FBI agents brandishing guns and screaming at him to put his hands behind his back. Agents slammed the 57-year-old Temple University physics professor against a wall and dragged him away in handcuffs — all in front of his wife and two daughters.https://news.vice.com/article/why-does-the-fbi-keep-arresting-asian-american-scientists

11/19/15 Rafu Shimpo: “Asian American Actors Less Afraid of Speaking Out About Race”
by Guy Aoki
In the past, Asian American actors seemed to be shy about addressing Hollywood’s double standards that kept them from getting significant roles in television and movies.
Leading the charge is Indian American actor Aziz Ansari, who’s currently starring in “Master of None” (all 10 episodes of the first season have just been released on Netflix). In the Nov. 10 issue of The New York Times, he wrote an essay, “Aziz Ansari on Acting, Race and Hollywood”:https://www.rafu.com/2015/11/into-the-next-stage-asian-american-actors-less-afraid-of-speaking-out-about-race/

11/19/15: NAPABA Condemns Roanoke Mayor’s References to the Japanese American Internment to Justify Suspension of Aid to Syrian Refugees
Washington — We are outraged by Mayor David Bowers’ disgraceful comments about his decision to suspend assistance from both government and nongovernmental agencies to Syrian refugees in Roanoke, Virginia. His inflammatory remarks invoke the distrust and xenophobia that led to the unjustifiable internment of thousands of Japanese Americans during World War II.
This is unacceptable and such intolerance has no place in our country.
As Asian Pacific Americans, we are shocked that Mayor Bowers would justify his actions by referring to one of the darkest chapters in American history, when an entire community was unjustly held in suspicion, taken away from their homes and livelihoods, and interned because of their ethnicity. Instead, we must learn from that tragic time and refuse to demonize Muslims, Syrians, and others seeking safe haven in America, as many of our forebears once did.
Earlier this week, President Obama announced that Minoru Yasui, an internee who challenged the internment of Japanese Americans in the U.S. Supreme Court, would receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The U.S. Congress apologized for internment in 1988. Sadly, Mayor Bowers has shown that many of the same prejudices Mr. Yasui faced in 1942 still exist today and, unfortunately, he is not alone in promoting this intolerance. More than half of the nation’s governors, members of Congress, and state and local lawmakers around the country have echoed this xenophobia, which vilifies entire communities.
We must recognize the humanitarian needs of refugee populations and we must refuse to act based on fear and intolerance. As history has shown, such actions do not make our country safer and rejects the basic tenants of what it means to be an American and betrays our deepest values.

11/18/15 press release: “OCA condemns Mayor Bowers anti-refugee reference to Japanese internment”
Washington, D.C. — OCA – Asian Pacific American Advocates condemns Mayor David A. Bowers reference to Japanese internment in his opposition to Syrian refugee resettlement.
Earlier today, Mayor David A. Bowers of Roanoke, Virginia, released a statement regarding his opposition to Syrian refugee resettlement in the Roanoke Valley. He then justified his statement by writing:
“I’m reminded that Franklin D. Roosevelt felt compelled to sequester Japanese foreign nationals after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and it appears that the threat of harm to America now from Isis is just as real and serious as that from our enemies then.”
“It is reprehensible that Mayor Bowers tries to justify his anti-refugee views by recalling one of the most heinous and shameful breaches of civil rights ever inflicted in this nation’s history,” said Angela Chiang, OCA – Central Virginia Chapter President. “Japanese internment took away the civil liberties, homes, and property of over 120,000 Japanese Americans simply because of fear rooted in racist and orientalist beliefs. As an Asian community leader in Virginia, it troubles me that the Mayor would base his comments on refugees on a policy that is universally regarded as a horrible breach of faith by our government and disturbed tens of thousands of lives. As an organization of concerned Asian American Virginians, we ask that the Mayor issue a sincere apology to both the Asian American and refugee communities.”
“Mayor Bowers’ comments reflect a personal xenophobic attitude compounded by a rather tenuous grasp of history. Those interned in America’s concentration camps were mostly U.S. Citizens and Lawful Permanent Residents, none of whom were ever convicted of espionage, sedition, or treason. That the internment violated core American values and Constitutional Rights is evidenced by Congress passing, and President George H.W. Bush’s signing, of legislation apologizing for the country’s wrongdoing and the payment of reparations to surviving internees. Rounding up people simply because they look like the enemy was wrong then and is wrong now,” said Michael W. Kwan, OCA National President. “This same line of bigoted thinking also led to the Chinese Exclusion Act designed to rid the country of ‘yellow peril’.”
“The Mayor’s comments serve to highlight the common flaws with both Japanese Internment and the anti-refugee sentiments today,” concluded Michael W. Kwan. “The same racist beliefs and misplaced appeals to security that led to Japanese internment are also the same arguments for excluding Syrian refugees from our borders. These are people under duress that we have a moral duty to protect, not a danger to society. We must strive to do better than our forefathers. Instead of falling back on fear, we must come together with compassion and accept these refugees.”
OCA – Asian Pacific American Advocates is a national organization of community advocates dedicated to improving the social, political, and economic well-being of Asian Pacific Americans (APAs).

Each year, many Asian-American applicants with excellent extra-curricular activities,competition medals, extraordinary SAT scores, and high GPAs are unfairly rejected by Ivy League universities, who illegally use quotas, racially-differentiated standards and stereotypesto discriminate against Asian-American applicants. On average, Asian-American students have to score 140-450 points higher on SATexams than students of other races in order to attend America’s elite universities. Such discrimination is happening all over the nation to Michael Wang, Jian Li, Vijay Chokal-Ingam, many other Asian-American children, and possibly to a child you know.

To fight against such severe and widespread discrimination, in May 2015 we united 64 Asian-American organizations and jointly filed a civil rights complaint with the Departments of Education and Justice against Harvard University. As the largest joint action taken by Asian-American groups to oppose such discrimination, the complaint generated an enormous amount of media attention throughout the world and attracted broad-based support from many groups across America, including bipartisan support from members of the US House of Representatives.

Shockingly, more than 160 ideology-driven Asian-American organizations recently filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court, supporting race-based college admissions, which upholds such discrimination against Asian-American children.

On December 9 2015, the Supreme Court will hear Fisher vs. University of Texas and determine if race can be used in college admissions. Asian-American communities cannot afford to be silent, allowing those ideology-driven organizations to have louder voices, misrepresenting the fact that most Asian-American parents believe that race should NEVER be factors in college admissions. As a result, Asian American Coalition for Education calls for Asian-American organizations to unite and jointly file complaints with the Department of Education and the Department of Justice against Yale University, Brown University and Dartmouth College in protest of their discrimination against Asian-American applicants. This action will bring two major benefits.

1. It will lead to social and political pressure urging Ivy League universities to reduce their discrimination against Asian-American applicants. After the Department of Education started investigating Harvard in 1988, its admission rate of Asian-Americans jumped from 10.8% in 1988 to 16.1% in 1991. Similarly, after a few Asian-American students filed a complaint against Princeton since 2006, its admission rate of Asian Americans increased from 14.7% in 2007 to 21.9% in 2012 and 25.4% in 2014.

2. It will let the Supreme Court hear our strong voice, and become aware of the severe and widespread discrimination Asian-American children are suffering.

Please join this fight, to win this crucial battle for your own children, and for all Asian Americans!

Any political or non-political organization can join us! Doing so is protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees free speech and the right to petition the government to protect our right to equal treatment under the law.

Please review the Executive Summary and join us by filling out the online form to sign on the Complaint.

Thank you so much for your support and wish you a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday!

11/12/15 Washington Post: Chinese-Americans are being caught mistakenly in the U.S.’s cybercrime dragnet
By Peter Zeidenberg
News item: Xiafen “Sherry” Chen, a Chinese American hydrologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is arrested at her office; the U.S. government accuses her of illegally accessing data at the behest of Chinese officials; less than a week before going to trial, the government drops all charges.
News item: Xiaoxing Xi, Chinese American chairman of the physics department at Temple University, is arrested at his home in front of his wife and children by a dozen armed agents; the government accuses him of helping the Chinese by providing them with proprietary materials owned by a U.S. company; all charges are dismissed after a PowerPoint presentation that includes affidavits from prominent physicists makes clear that no crime was committed.
The threat posed by Chinese hackers intent on stealing U.S. technologies is a justifiable federal concern. But this concern cannot override the need to act carefully and with prudence. Otherwise, the most significant harm to U.S. society may end up being self-inflicted.https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dawn-of-a-new-red-scare/2015/11/12/2e61d930-7cf3-11e5-b575-d8dcfedb4ea1_story.html?utm_source=NY+Times+%26+Wash.+Post+Condemn+DOJ&utm_campaign=BOD+Result&utm_medium=email

11/11/15 Vulture: “2015: The Year Asian-Americans Finally Got a Shot on TV”
By E. Alex Jung
It was a pointed reminder of Fresh Off the Boat’s own high-pressure debut earlier this year. At this time in 2014, there were just two shows headlined by Asian-American actors: Mindy Kaling’s The Mindy Project and Selfie, starring John Cho. Both were romantic comedies with Asian-American leads and would get canceled by their respective networks for flagging ratings: Fox declined to renew The Mindy Project and ABC would cancel Selfie after just six episodes. (RIP, Selfie.) Fresh Off the Boat came in with enormous expectations: It had been 20 years since the last Asian-American family sitcom on a broadcast network, Margaret Cho’s All-American Girl, had flamed out in one abbreviated and tumultuous season despite strong ratings at first. At the time, many Asian-American writers criticized the show for its hackneyed portrayal of a vague “Orient.” There was a fear that history would repeat itself: What if Fresh Off the Boat just recycled Asian stereotypes? If the show faltered, would Asian-Americans have to wait another 20 years to get another shot? It had to be perfect.http://www.vulture.com/2015/11/asian-americans-on-tv-2015.html#

11/10/2015 Daily Caller: “Why Is The University Of Missouri Racist Against Asian-Americans?”
by Jim Treacher
Most people have focused on the woman at the end of this video, who screams, “I need some muscle over here!” She’s trying to get rid of a student reporter in a public place, in front of cameras, which is pretty great because she’s a journalism professor.
But I’m more interested in how this angry mob treated the photographer, an Asian-American student. His name is Tim Tai, and he was just trying to do his job. He explained himself well, not that he should’ve had to: He was in a public place, and he was recording the event for posterity. He was exercising his First Amendment rights in the United States of America. He had as much right to be there as anybody else.
And yet he was swarmed and jostled and screamed at and taunted and threatened by a fascist mob. He was disrespected by angry, hostile people who tried to erase his lived experience. His feelings were utterly disregarded, and he was cruelly triggered again and again. His tormentors tried to shame him for being who he is.

11/9/2015 Voice of America: “Asian-American Voters Abandon Republicans”
Anh “Joseph” Cao felt uneasy when his Republican colleagues made comments about immigrants.
Cao was a Republican congressman from 2009 to 2011 in a Democratic district of Louisiana. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1975 from Vietnam when he was a child. He says he sometimes heard comments from his Republican colleagues that he considered anti-immigrant and insensitive.http://learningenglish.voanews.com/content/asian-american-voters-abandon-republicans/3038489.html

11/9/2015 Huffington Post: “Not Your Model Minority: The Reality of the Asian American and Pacific Islander Community”
by Dr. Tung Thanh Nguyen
In response to the recent column published in the New York Times asking the misleading question “Why are Asian Americans so successful in America?” we must confront the dangers of such stereotypes and conversations.
For far too long, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) have faced the model minority myth – the notion that virtually all AAPIs are well-educated, affluent and successful. Although AAPIs are now the fastest growing racial group in the country, expected to double from 20 million to 49 million by 2060, we are not a monolithic group. The AAPI community spans two-dozen groups with innumerable cultures, religious faiths and languages; each with unique challenges and needs. For instance, one out of three AAPIs does not speak English fluently. And among some, there are low levels of educational attainment and high levels of unemployment. Pacific Islanders have among the highest unemployment rates of all racial and ethnic groups; 40 percent of Hmong Americans do not complete high school; and more than two million AAPIs live in poverty. Stereotyping AAPIs as just one model minority results in individual groups’ needs not being acknowledged, understood or met.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-tung-thanh-nguyen/not-your-model-minority-t_b_8513548.html

11/6/15 LA Weekly: “Aziz Ansari’s Master of None Is a Small Step for TV, A Giant Leap for Asian-Americans Progress”
BY Inkoo Kangfriday
In its very first scene, Aziz Ansari’s new Netflix series, Master of None, presents something never before seen on TV: an Asian-American male romantic lead at the center of his own series. Granted, that scene is hardly sexy: A broken condom puts the brakes on a bar hook-up between Dev (Ansari) and Rachel (Noël Wells), leading to an Uber ride to the pharmacy to pick up some Plan B. Still, given the historical desexualization of Asian and Asian-American men in pop culture, it’s novel, even bracing, to watch an Indian-American dude deal with his totally normal cock.http://www.laweekly.com/film/aziz-ansaris-master-of-none-is-a-small-step-for-tv-a-giant-leap-for-asian-american-progress-6248233

11/5/15 Los Angeles Times: “Rep. Lieu wants to know if Asian American scientists accused of espionage were targeted”
by Sarah D. Wire
Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Torrance) and 42 members of Congress are asking Atty. Gen. Loretta Lynch for a full Justice Department investigation into whether there is a pattern behind several Chinese American scientists being arrested in the U.S. on espionage charges.http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-ted-lieu-espionage-letter-story.html

11/4/15 Aljazeera America: “Seeking votes – and campaign cash – from booming Asian America; Asian Americans are more affluent than other groups and constituted 10 of the top 12 nonwhite political donors in 2014”
by Bobby Calvan
Sang Yi could barely squeeze into the tiny but crowded Lebanese restaurant up the street from his home in Fairfax County, Virginia, when he launched his bid in April for a seat in the state’s House of Delegates.
Family members, friends and neighbors were there, of course, to wish him luck. But he scanned the room and saw faces he didn’t recognize, many of them old Korean faces that seemed to beam with pride, said Yi, who arrived in the United States from South Korea when he was 4.http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/11/4/seeking-votes-and-campaign-cash-from-booming-asian-america.html

11/4/15 New York Times: “Why Are Asian-Americans Such Loyal Democrats?”
by Thomas B. Edsall
In just two decades, Asian-American support for the Democratic presidential candidate more than doubled, from the 31 percent Bill Clinton got in 1992 to the 73 percent cast for President Obama in 2012, according to exit polls.

11/3/15 Aljazeera America: “Asian Americans lag blacks and Latinos in registering to vote; Language, culture barriers persist in mobilizing fastest-growing segment of US population”
by Bobby Calvan
Immigration and religion may be incendiary topics, but Christian Bato doesn’t mind playing with a little fire if it stokes the political passions of his fellow Nevadans, particularly among the booming population of Filipino Americans in a state that could play a pivotal role in next year’s presidential election.
Bato, who is of Filipino descent, is a community organizer with iAmerica, a national campaign to encourage immigrant communities to participate in the country’s electoral process.
“Sometimes you have to take a topical issue that’s in the news to light a fire under the AAPI [Asian American and Pacific Islander] community,” said Bato, who is based in Las Vegas.http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/11/3/asian-americans-lag-behind-blacks-and-latinos-in-registering-to-vote.html

10/29/15 Arizona Sonora News: “The little-known history of Arizona’s Chinese”
By Zachary Pleeter
One insight struck Chia-Lin Pao Tao when she arrived in Tucson in 1976.
She was most surprised by how few Asians she saw along with little, if any, marks of Chinese legacy in the area. Today, she knows differently.
The Chinese have a long connection to Arizona’s past, playing substantial roles in the state’s development of transportation, agriculture and mining.

10/22/2015 Huffington Post: “Why the GOP Is Going to Lose the Asian American Vote Again… And Why It Matters”
by Kumar Rao
In 2012, 93% of African Americans, 71% of Latinos and 73% of Asian Americans voted to re-elect President Obama. That Asian Americans voted in higher numbers for the Democratic Party in 2012 than any other point in history should have sounded a major alarm to Republican candidates. Indeed, in the aftermath of that election, pundits, consultants and even an internal party “autopsy” made clear that the GOP needed to course correct and make significant headway with minority voters to have any practical chance at the presidency in future elections. The last few years, however, have laid bare the Republicans’ permanent inability and disinterest in civil and respectful dialogue with communities of color or the progressive issues that matter most to them.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kumar-rao/why-the-gop-is-going-to-l_b_8306418.html

10/21/15 New Yorker: “The Two Asian Americas: Erika Lee’s “The Making of Asian America” explores how systemic racism has pervaded the Asian-American experience”
By Karan Mahajan
In 1928, an Indian immigrant named Vaishno Das Bagai rented a room in San Jose, turned on the gas, and ended his life. He was thirty-seven. He had come to San Francisco thirteen years earlier with his wife and two children, “dreaming and hoping to make this land my own.” A dapper man, he learned English, wore three-piece suits, became a naturalized citizen, and opened a general store and import business on Fillmore Street, in San Francisco. But when Bagai tried to move his family into a home in Berkeley, the neighbors locked up the house, and the Bagais had to turn their luggage trucks back. Then, in 1923, Bagai found himself snared by anti-Asian laws: the Supreme Court ruled that South Asians, because they were not white, could not become naturalized citizens of the United States. Bagai was stripped of his status. Under the California Alien Land Law, of 1913—a piece of racist legislation designed to deter Asians from encroaching on white businesses and farms—losing that status also meant losing his property and his business. The next blow came when he tried to visit India. The United States government advised him to apply for a British passport.http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-two-asian-americas

10/19/15 press release: “Organization of Chinese Americans Disgusted by Racist Sign on Campaign Trail in Maine”
by Nick W. Lee
Washington, D.C. – OCA – Asian Pacific American Advocates is disgusted by a racist sign against mayoral candidate Ben Chin in Lewiston, Maine.
Earlier today, news agencies reported that signs attacking mayoral candidate Ben Chin wer put up in downtown Lewiston, Maine. The signs read: “Don’t vote for Ho Chi Chin” and feature an orientalist and racist caricature comparing the candidate to the North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, complete with slanted eyes and Soviet hammers and sickles.
“All forms of racism, particularly one so blatant, are disgusting and unspeakable on many levels,” said Ken Lee, OCA’s Chief Executive Officer. “It is sad that in today’s America, people would try to use one’s heritage so crudely against him. Though America is built on the promise of equal opportunity, this incident demonstrates that this promise remains unfulfilled as these attacks would never be leveled at candidates perceived as fully white.”
“I would like to emphasize that this incident is not isolated, but is part of a continuing historical pattern of blanket racism that continues to affect all Asian Americans. Whether it was the beating of Chinese American Vincent Chin because attackers assumed he was a Japanese auto executive in 1982 or a racist sign that associates a Chinese American candidate with a Vietnamese autocrat in 2015, this pattern has repeatedly stereotyped against Asian Americans as a whole,” continued Lee. “However, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have strength in numbers, and OCA and the communities we serve will continue to say loudly that this will not stand, whether the election is local or national. We call upon all candidates and parties to clearly and emphatically state that racism has no place in our society and certainly not in our elections.”
OCA – Asian Pacific American Advocates is a national organization of community advocates dedicated to improving the social, political, and economic well-being of Asian Pacific Americans (APAs).

10/15/15 Journal News: “150 people show up at Fairfield board meeting to protest bullying”
By Eric Robinette
Fairfield — More than 150 people packed the Fairfield Board of Education meeting at the high school Thursday to confront district officials again about their inaction with regard to bullying in the schools.
It was the second time in five months a swarm of angry parents have addressed the board.
The district has been under fire for its handling of bullying ever since Fairfield Middle School student Emilie Olsen took her own life in December 2014. Her family contended that bullying had a hand in her death.
Upset parents turned out in mass Thursday after news surfaced of another allegation of bullying against an Asian-American student at the middle school — and the alleged bully was the same student who had also bullied Olsen.http://www.journal-news.com/news/news/asian-american-parents-to-protest-bullying-tonight/nn3sN/

10/12/15 Sacaramento Bee: “Asian Americans celebrate rising political clout, call for more voter turnout”
BY Stephen Magagnini
When Dr. Richard Pan was growing up, a career in politics wasn’t considered a viable option for Asian American kids.
Pan said his parents – like many immigrants – pushed their children into careers in medicine, engineering and other fields that depend on technical skills. His Taiwanese parents preached that another great leveler was financial success in business, Pan said.
So Pan, 49, became a doctor first, a politician later and now a Democratic state senator representing Sacramento. On Sunday, Pan joined a host of other Asian American public servants at the 14th annual Voters Education Forum at California State University, Sacramento, sponsored by APAPA, the Asian Pacific Islander American Public Affairs Association.http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/article38781312.html

10/12/15 New York Times: “Hazing and Drinking Deaths at Asian-American Fraternities Raise Concerns”
By Winnie Hu
Syracuse University students trying to join Nu Alpha Phi, an Asian-American fraternity, were given demerits when they made mistakes during pledging, and a way to work them off.
There were push-ups and situps in the attic of the fraternity house, according to investigators and students. There were extended periods in a sitting position — knees bent, backs to the wall — that tested their physical strength and resolve. And on one frigid night in March, there were exercises outdoors in a park, with three pledges crawling and rolling in the snow with no gloves. One of them got frostbite on both hands and faced losing several fingers.

10/11/15 New York Times: “The Asian Advantage”
By Nicholas Kristof
This is an awkward question, but here goes: Why are Asian-Americans so successful in America?

10/9/15 New York Daily News: “The Martian’ comes under fire for not casting Asian-American actors”
by Nicole Bitette
Ridley Scott’s “The Martian” is being slammed by an advocacy group for the lack of Asian American actors in the film.
Media Action Network For Asian Americans calls “The Martian” just one of many films that are being “white-washed” compared to the written material they are based on.
The film was adapted into a screenplay by Drew Goddard from Andy Weir’s novel by the same name.
MANAA pointed out that in Weir’s novel, NASA’s Director of Mars Operations is Dr. Venkat Kapoor — an Asian Indian character who identifies as Hindu.
In Scott’s film, he is played by British black actor Chiwetel Ejiofor and the name is changed to Vincent Kapoor.
Character Mindy Park is written as Korean American in the novel, but portrayed by Mackenzie Davis — a white blonde actress.http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/movies/martian-fire-lack-asian-american-actors-article-1.2391252

10/9/15 CBS News: “”Martian” criticized for changing races of Asian-American characters”
By Andrea Park
Just months after Cameron Crowe got heat for casting Emma Stone as an Asian-American character in “Aloha,” new Matt Damon flick “The Martian” is getting similar blowback.
The Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA) lobbed accusations of whitewashing against Ridley Scott for changing the races of two Asian characters in the film version of the book.
Character Mindy Park, who is Korean-American in the book, is played by white actress Mackenzie Davis in the film, and book character Dr. Venkat Kapoor’s name is changed to Vincent Kapoor, and is played by Chiwetel Ejiofo.http://www.cbsnews.com/news/martian-criticized-for-changing-races-of-asian-american-characters/

10/05/2015 Huffington Post: “Can the GOP Win Over Asian Americans?”
by Taeku Lee
A major new Pew Research study, released on the 50th anniversary of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, documents the rapid demographic changes to the U.S. population in recent decades. Among its key findings, the Pew study shows that Asian Americans are the fastest growing immigrant group in the country and will comprise the largest immigrant population in the nation in several decades.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/latino-decisions/can-the-gop-win-over-asia_b_8243188.html

10/3/15 The Economist: “The model minority is losing patience”
Asian-Americans are the United States’ most successful minority, but they are complaining ever more vigorously about discrimination, especially in academia
MICHAEL WANG, a young Californian, came second in his class of 1,002 students; his ACT score was 36, the maximum possible; he sang at Barack Obama’s inauguration; he got third place in a national piano contest; he was in the top 150 of a national maths competition; he was in several national debating-competition finals. But when it came to his university application he faced a serious disappointment for the first time in his glittering career. He was rejected by six of the seven Ivy League colleges to which he applied.http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21669595-asian-americans-are-united-states-most-successful-minority-they-are-complaining-ever

10/2/15 NJ.com: “Group contests findings that Princeton U. didn’t discriminate against Asian applicants”
by Cristina Rojas
Princeton — A group is disputing the findings of a federal report that found that Princeton University did not discriminate against Asian or Asian-American applicants.
The Asian American Coalition for Education called the report “shocking, disappointing and unconvincing.”http://www.nj.com/mercer/index.ssf/2015/10/group_contests_findings_that_princeton_u_didnt_dis.html

9/26/15 ThinkProgress.org: “The Growing Poverty Crisis That Everyone Is Ignoring”
by Sharon H. Chang
Sameth is an Asian American who has lived in the greater Seattle area since he was three years old. Asians in America are commonly stereotyped as economically successful, very educated and socially mobile. But Sameth’s lived experience defies the stereotype. He was born in 1982 inside a Thai Refugee Camp called Kao I Dang not long after his mother watched her entire family executed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. He is a Cambodian/Khmer refugee who grew up poor in the United States.

9/24/15 Inside HigherEd: “Anti-Asian Bias Claim Rejected”
By Scott Jaschik
The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights — concluding an investigation that started in 2006 and expanded in 2008 — has cleared Princeton University of charges that it discriminates against Asian-American applicants. The OCR investigation found that Princeton considered race only in ways consistent with U.S. Supreme Court rulings, and without creating a quota system that limited Asian-American admissions.https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/09/24/ocr-clears-princeton-anti-asian-discrimination-admissions

9/23/2015 Huffington Post: “Racism Against Asians And Asian Americans Is Prejudice You Can Still Get Away With”
by Miraj U. Desai
This country is having a national conversation around race that is long overdue. As someone who researches prejudice and racism, I’d like to add an observation to the mix: for the most part, one can still get away with discriminating against, humiliating, and co-opting Asians, Asian Americans, and Asian cultures.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/miraj-u-desai/racism-against-asians-and_b_8185388.html

9/16/15 NBC News: “Is the GOP Losing the Asian-American Vote?”
by Chris Fuchs
For Zhonggang (Cliff) Li, Jeb Bush was an attractive presidential candidate early on.
Li, a Chinese-American resident of Florida and self-described moderate Republican, pointed to an executive order that Bush had signed in 2000 as Florida’s governor that ended race-based college admissions–an issue that resonates with many Asian Americans–as one of the reasons the Republican hopeful appealed to him.
And then came the “anchor baby” comment.http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/gop-losing-asian-american-vote-n423271

9/15/15 New York Times: The Rush to Find China’s Moles
By The Editorial Board
On Friday, prosecutors dropped wire fraud charges filed in May against Xi Xiaoxing, the chairman of Temple University’s physics department. He was accused of sharing privileged technology with China and faced up to 80 years in prison.
The embarrassing blunder came a few months after federal prosecutors in Ohio dropped charges against another Chinese-American professional, Sherry Chen, a National Weather Service employee who was also suspected of being a Chinese mole. She was charged with four felonies, including unlawfully downloading information about critical infrastructure. The email was Ms. Chen’s response to a question from a Chinese official who had asked her during a meeting in Beijing how water infrastructure projects in America were funded. The information she gave him was harmless and publicly available.

9/15/15 WBEZ: “Asian-American community: IPRA not holding cops accountable”
by Rob Wildeboer
Members of Chicago’s Asian-American community said their meeting with Scott Ando shows his agency, the Independent Police Review Authority, has a problem holding cops accountable. Ando is the head of IPRA, which investigates police misconduct.
In a 2013 police raid caught on video, an officer makes racists comments to an Asian- American woman he’s arresting, and then he threatens her and her family with death. IPRA has recommended a 25-day suspension for the officer.http://www.wbez.org/news/asian-american-community-ipra-not-holding-cops-accountable-112932

9/14/15 NBC News: “Asian Americans React to Alabama Mistrial #AfterSeptember11”
by Frances Kai-Hwa Wang
The declaration of a mistrial for the Alabama police officer who partially paralyzed an Indian grandfather in February has drawn outrage from Asian American advocacy groups.
“SAALT is deeply disappointed by the mistrial declared in the trial of former Officer Eric Parker, who is accused of the brutal beating of Mr. Sureshbhai Patel in Madison, Alabama,” Suman Raghunathan, Executive Director of South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) told NBC News. “Mr. Patel remains partially paralyzed as a result of his interaction with Officer Parker, and is still in need of extensive medical care in a rehabilitation facility. Mr. Patel’s right to justice remains a dream painfully deferred.”http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/asian-americans-react-alabama-mistrial-afterseptember11-n427176

9/11/15 Wall Street Journal: “American Exceptionalism and Why I’m Proud to Be an ‘Anchor Baby’”
By Raymond Yung Lin
I am an “anchor baby” and proud of it. That’s the term Donald Trump has used to describe people whose parents chose to have their children gain U.S. citizenship by being born on American soil. Mr. Trump wants to take my U.S. citizenship from me—a citizenship that I received after years of struggle by my parents to come to this great country, a citizenship guaranteed by the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. I say, let him try. He won’t succeed.http://www.wsj.com/articles/american-exceptionalism-and-why-im-proud-to-be-an-anchor-baby-1442012894

9/11/15 press release: “100+ Asian American Organizations Urge Supreme Court to Ban Racial Discrimination in College Admissions”
Short Hills, N.J., PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — The Asian American Coalition for Education (“AACE”), representing 117 Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, Korean, Vietnamese and other Asian American community and education organizations, and the Asian American Legal Foundation (“AALF”) jointly filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court to urge a total ban on racial discrimination in college admissions. This document was filed in support of the plaintiff, Abigail Fisher, in the Fisher v. University of Texas lawsuit.http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/100-asian-american-organizations-urge-supreme-court-to-ban-racial-discrimination-in-college-admissions-300141738.html

9/9/15 NBC News: “Asian-American Scientist Accused Of Espionage Reportedly Fired”
by Emil Guillermo
For Asian-American scientists accused by the U.S. government of spying, Wednesday was a day of mixed signals.
For Dr. Xiaoxing Xi, the former chair of the Temple University physics department, accused of criminal wire fraud and sharing sensitive information with China, there was a reprieve for now.
But at the National Weather Service, Sherry Chen’s world went upside down–again.
Chen, a naturalized American and a National Weather Service hydrologist who was facing 25 years in prison and $1 million in fines for spy allegations–only to have the charges dropped by federal prosecutors– once again finds herself under scrutiny. This time, Chen’s employer, who had placed her on administrative leave with pay and benefits since the summer, has proposed to terminate her from federal employment.http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/asian-american-scientist-accused-espionage-reportedly-fired-n424636

9/4/15 New York Times: “Book Review: ‘The Making of Asian America,’ by Erika Lee”
By Oliver Wang
Early in Erika lee’s sweeping “The Making of Asian America: A History” she suggests that Asian-Americans constantly cycle between being labeled “good Asians” versus “bad Asians,” depending on the shifting and often contradictory politics behind their immigration and settlement. We were a “despised ­minority” when Asian immigrants threatened 19th- and early-20th-century white labor, yet since the Cold War we’ve been described as a “model minority,” valorizing the promise of American meritocracy. The capricious ease with which those labels get swapped highlights how our precarious social position rests on our perceived utility: as cheap labor, as anti-­Communist soldiers, as overachievers meant to ­success-shame other communities of ­color. In doing all of this “work,” Lee argues, Asian-­Americans have redefined not only immigration politics and racial categories but also “the very essence of what it means to be ­American.”

As others have noted, the phenomenon of birth tourism is distinct from most conventional understandings of the offensive term “anchor baby,” which tends to imply that people use birthright citizenship from their children to avoid deportation or eventually gain U.S. citizenship for themselves.

There has been a fair amount of sensationalist reporting on birth tourism by Chinese immigrants, with little understanding of the number of estimated “birth tourists,” and how they compare to the overall number of Chinese immigrants or visitors to the United States. Below, we provide some numbers in perspective.

Estimates of birth tourists are inherently difficult to come by, because hospitals do not inquire on the visa status of mothers, and tracking outmigration from the United States by visa category is not possible. Still, the conservative Center for Immigration Studies estimates the total number of birth tourists from around the world to be about 36,000 per year, while other sources indicate the annual number of Chinese birth tourists to be around 20,000.

To put those numbers into perspective, Chinese birth tourists account for about 1% of all Chinese tourists visiting the United States, who numbered around 2.2 million in 2014. Chinese tourism is also a major part of total international tourism spending in the United States, accounting for $24 billion in tourism spending, according to the Department of Commerce, and second only to Canadian tourists who spent around $27 billion.

The federal government has already cracked down significantly on birth tourism establishments, with evidence suggesting that the overall numbers of birth tourists from China may be in decline. Targeting individuals who may be intending to engage in birth tourism is not only likely to invoke concerns about racial profiling and violations of privacy, it also puts at risk a robust and growing trend in Chinese tourism to the United States, which is expected to reach $81 billion in spending by 2021.

8/28/15 Washington Post: “The ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ of stereotyping Asian American students”
By Sarah Kaplan
Lee, a sociologist at the University of California at Irvine, is an author of the new book “The Asian American Achievement Paradox,” which examines how stereotypes based on race can determine students’ chances for success. For their research, she and co-author Min Zhou surveyed hundreds of students like Ophelia — children of Vietnamese and Chinese immigrants who felt they were treated differently because of their race.
“Teachers and guidance counselors and peers assumed that they were smart and disciplined and high achieving,” Lee told The Washington Post. “So they were more likely to be placed on advanced tracks, more likely to be directed toward selective colleges. Some admitted to getting grades they didn’t feel like they deserved.”http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/08/28/the-self-fulfilling-prophesy-of-stereotyping-asian-american-students/

8/24/15 The Daily Bruin: “Arthur Wang: Policy, history aid in Asian American success, not cultural values”
by Arthur Wang
“UCLA stands for UC Lots of Asians.” I’m sure you have heard that one before.
Asians are everywhere at UCLA – 34 percent of undergraduates, to be exact. Around 15 percent of the Ivy League students is Asian, even as that number is 4.8 percent nationally. Those are facts. But what everyone wants to know is – why? Why are Asians so well-represented at top schools?http://dailybruin.com/2015/08/24/arthur-wang-policy-history-aid-in-asian-american-success-not-cultural-values/

8/21/15 Slate.com: “Not Just Anti-Hispanic; The GOP could be angering Asian voters with its latest nativist turn and dooming itself to a repeat of 2012”
By Jamelle Bouie
Of course, rhetoric aside, America’s immigrant community goes beyond Latino and Hispanic Americans. It includes Africans, Europeans, and Asians, one of the fastest growing groups in the country. Not all Asians are tied to the immigrant experience—more than a quarter are native-born, with long and durable ties to the United States. But the large majority are foreign-born, with roots in a variety of different countries, from China and Japan to Korea, Vietnam, India, and Bangladesh. Moreover, they’re a rising share of the electorate—in 1996, just 1.6 percent of voters were Asian. In 2012, it was 3.4 percent. As second- and third-generation Asian Americans take the stage in national life, that voting block will increase.http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/08/donald_trump_immigration_and_asians_is_the_gop_dooming_itself_to_a_repeat.html

8/15/15 Kotaku: “The Realest Comic About Growing Up Asian American, And Hating Yourself”by Kevin WongThe moment that I knew graphic novel American Born Chinese was something special, and real, was in its second chapter.One of the main characters, Jin Wang, is a young, Chinese American boy who moved from an Asian neighborhood in San Francisco to a white one in the suburbs. Jin has a horrible time adjusting. http://kotaku.com/the-realest-comic-about-growing-up-asian-american-and-1724281672

8/10/15 Pacific Standard: “The Dangerous Weight of Expectations; Why do so many Asian-American students suffer from depression?”
by Jennifer Chen
During the fall semester of her senior year at New York University in 2011, Reera Yoo found herself struggling to remember simple things, like what she’d had for breakfast that morning. She would find herself holding pills and knives, but not knowing why. A couple of weeks before she was hospitalized for suicidal tendencies, anxiety about going outside kept Yoo from leaving her room. Friends started noticing her erratic behavior as well.http://www.psmag.com/health-and-behavior/why-the-suicide-rate-is-high-for-asian-college-students

8/9/15 Dallas Morning News: “One family’s journey from Vietnam to Fort Worth changed lives of many: Thomas Nguyen and wife Mary fled Vietnam in 1975, starting a refugee journey that took them to Thailand and the Philippines, then to New Jersey and Texas. The photograph shows them shortly after their wedding. Soon they’ll celebrate their 40th anniversary”
By Naomi Nishihara
Teresa Nguyen grew up hearing stories of the little village where her parents worked as rice farmers.
But she never visited until a year and a half ago. She was 31 — the same age as her father when he left Vietnam. It was time, she decided, to meet her family and learn about her past.
Teresa traveled to Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon. Her parents warned her that things would be different there. It would be crowded. When she went to the countryside, there would be mosquitoes. She might have to go to the bathroom in a hole.http://www.dallasnews.com/news/metro/20150808-one-familys-journey-from-vietnam-to-fort-worth-changed-lives-of-many.ece

8/5/15 Adage.com: “How BuzzFeed Is Winning With Asian-Americans; Four Strategies for Brands to Engage with the Asian-American Audience”
By Yuriy Boykiv
At first glance, a hard-hitting piece on affirmative action seems far removed from the humorous viral sensation “Ask An Asian.” Yet both pieces were published on BuzzFeed — an unlikely hub for issues affecting Asian-Americans. BuzzFeed hasn’t been shy about pursuing this wildly underserved market and has achieved impressive cultural relevancy that many brands have failed to earn.http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/buzzfeed-winning-asian-americans/299823/

8/4/15 Inside Higher Ed: “Authors discuss reasoning behind high levels of Asian American achievement”
by Jacqueline Thomsen
Asian Americans have been found to be some of the most successful individuals in education, with many earning top grades at some of the top schools in the nation before attending highly ranked colleges and pursuing higher degrees. But why is this one demographic so successful in the U.S.? Authors Jennifer Lee, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Irvine, and Min Zhou, a professor of sociology at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the University of California at Los Angeles, sought to determine the factors behind high levels of Asian American achievement.https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/08/04/authors-discuss-reasoning-behind-high-levels-asian-american-achievement

8/3/15 CNN: “The truth about Asian Americans’ success (it’s not what you think)”
By Jennifer Lee
Jennifer Lee: Asian immigrants do well in the United States largely because of “ethnic capital” — institutions such as info-sharing networks and tutoring
She says this help passes from educated to low-wage workers; American schools should provide similar help to other immigrant groups
Jennifer Lee is professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and the author, with Min Zhou, of “The Asian American Achievement Paradox,” published by the Russell Sage Foundation.http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/03/opinions/lee-immigration-ethnic-capital/

8/3/15 Los Angeles Times: “Giving circles’ plant seeds of philanthropy in Asian American communities”
By Anh Do
Three platters of juicy dumplings landed on the table as the donors, who gather once a year, sprinkled their strategizing with talk of dipping sauces.
For members of the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Islander Giving Circle, the meeting is a chance to mingle and celebrate their efforts to fund causes like the Chinese Parents Assn. for the Disabled and Tafesilafa’i — a cultural festival in Long Beach. The event, which in 17 years never earned a profit, received a $3,000 grant from the giving circle to use for publicity.http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-ff-asian-philanthropy-20150803-story.html

7/27/15 blogher.com: “Q&A With Prof. Jennifer Lee: Asian American Success Isn’t What You Think It Is”
By Grace Hwang Lynch
Pop culture often portrays Asian Americans as successful because of strict parenting or just plain hard work. But a new book debunks the “model minority” myth, revealing the way government policies have actually skewed those perceptions. I recently interviewed Jennifer Lee, Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and co-author of The Asian American Achievement Paradox about her research.http://www.blogher.com/qa-prof-jennifer-lee-real-reason-behind-asian-american-paradox

7/23/15 Businesswire.com: “Discover Recognized as a Leader in Developing and Attracting Asian Pacific-American Employees”
Discover Financial Services has been recognized as a recipient of four Best Asian Pacific American (APA) Employer Awards. Presented by the Asia Society, the awards honor companies that support and develop APA employees.http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150723006417/en/#.VcfeYfk8rMU

7/22/15 Grist.org: “What does race have to do with this Yosemite hike?”
By Julia Shu
Located in the southeast corner of Yosemite National Park, Sing Peak draws little attention. It’s a non-descript rocky mass that lacks the sweeping majesty of, say,Half Dome. But Sing Peak holds a rare distinction. The 10,552-foot mountain is named after a Chinese American — Tie Sing, a camp cook for the U.S. Geological Survey from the late 1800s and early 1900s.What does race have to do with this Yosemite hike?

7/21/2015 CNN: “Ho Feng Shan: The ‘Chinese Schindler’ who saved thousands of Jews”
By Wayne Chang
Story highlights
Ho Feng Shan was the consul general in Vienna for the Nationalist Chinese government from 1938 to 1940
He rescued tens of thousands of Jews by issuing visas to Shanghai
However, his heroic acts only came to light after his deathhttp://edition.cnn.com/2015/07/19/asia/china-jews-schindler-ho-feng-shan/index.html

7/17/15 Wall Street Journal: “An Irony in Asian-American Voting; It is hoped that Asian-Americans will start to apply their intellectual acumen in academic pursuits to the art of politics and realize the compelling logic of voting for conservative politicians”
Your July 9 editorial “Harvard’s Discrimination Dodge” concerning de facto discrimination against Asian-American aspiring college students brings to mind the H.L. Mencken quote: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
It is progressive philosophy that mandates outcomes be apportioned according to the relative numbers of the constituent racial or ethnic groups. Thus, if a particular group like Asian-Americans outperform the general population in academic pursuits, they will suffer from progressive policies. Yet large majorities of Asian-Americans voted for Barack Obama—the most progressive president in U.S. history—both in 2008 and 2012. Perhaps this paradoxical voting pattern results from a knee-jerk feeling among Asian-Americans that modern-day Republicans are racists, while the Democrats stand for “social justice.”
The irony is that because conservative Republican principles reward hard work and accomplishment with focus on the individual, while increasingly “progressive” Democrat principles focus on race and ethnicity-based outcomes it is not Republicans but today’s Democrats who are racist and specifically suppress overachieving Asian-Americans to satisfy racial quotas. It is hoped that Asian-Americans will start to apply their intellectual acumen in academic pursuits to the art of politics and realize the compelling logic of voting for conservative politicians. It is not only in their interest to do so, but in the rest of America’s interest as well. It would be encouraging if at least in this case Mr. Mencken’s contemptuous view of humanity proves wrong.
S. Levin
Philadelphiahttp://www.wsj.com/articles/an-irony-in-asian-american-voting-1437172387

7/17/15 Quartz: “The complicated relationship between Asian Americans and affirmative action”
by Lauren Gurley
The second problem was a practical one. Technically, all three options—white, Asian, both—were truthful. In the ruthless competition that is college admissions, prospective students will often do anything they can to increase their chances of admission, and I found myself wondering if selecting white was more strategic than Asian. According to a 2005 Princeton University study that measured how race effects admissions decisions, Asians lost the equivalent of 50 SAT points while African-Americans and Latinos gained 230 and 165 SAT points, respectively.The complicated relationship between Asian Americans and affirmative action

7/9/15 Forbes: “Stereotyping Asian-Americans: Harvard Calls It ‘Diversity’ But It’s More Like Racial Balancing”
by YuKong Zhao
While Harvard University says it champions diversity, its real focus is on racial balancing.
Each year, many Asian-American students with top SAT scores and GPAs who demonstrate excellent leadership skills (plus countless awards) are unjustifiably rejected by Harvard and other Ivy League schools. Asian-American admission rates at these universities have remained around 14-18% for the past 20 years, while during that same time period, the percentage of Asian-Americans between the ages of 18 and 21 almost doubled.http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/10/02/what-drives-chinas-success/

7/8/15 Wall Street Journal: “Harvard’s Discrimination Dodge; The Obama Administration dismisses a bias complaint by Asian-Americans”
Harvard University is looking for legal cover to justify discriminating against Asian-Americans, and it has an ally in Washington. The Education Department on Tuesday said it had dismissed a complaint from 64 organizations alleging that Harvard uses de facto quotas to limit Asian-Americans on campus.
The percentage of Asian-American students at Harvard and other elite universities has held suspiciously steady for two decades at about 18%, while the number of college-age Asian-Americans has increased rapidly. In May the coalition asked the civil-rights arms of the Education and Justice Departments to investigate why Asian-Americans, who make up about 5% of the population but earn an estimated 30% of National Merit semifinalist honors, aren’t accepted to Harvard in numbers that reflect these qualifications.
The Department cited pending litigation as grounds for dismissal, and the only such suit is one against Harvard and the University of North Carolina filed in November by Students for Fair Admissions. This sounds reasonable, but wait. Harvard and UNC’s lawyers this week filed motions to halt the lawsuits until the Supreme Court reconsiders race-based admissions next term in Fisher v. University of Texas. That ruling won’t surface until 2016, and Harvard’s strategy is to drag out inquiries in hopes the Court blesses race-based admissions.
Yet Harvard’s hall pass from Education is a reason for the Supremes to strike down racial preferences—definitively. The Court stopped short in 2013 when it first ruled in Fisher, a case involving a white woman denied admission to the University of Texas at Austin. Justice Anthony Kennedy carved out a murky three-prong threshold for racial preferences, rather than overturning the 2003 decision Grutter v. Bollinger that sanctioned the use of race as a “plus” factor. Colleges treated Justice Kennedy’s standard the way students look at “suggested reading” on a syllabus; they ignored it.
A similarly narrow ruling next year could give Harvard and other top schools license to maintain de facto quotas. Asian-Americans need to score 140 points higher on the SAT than white students to be considered equal applicants on paper, and 450 points higher than African-Americans, according to independent research cited in the complaint.
Meantime, the Asian-American coalition says it will continue to push back, potentially broadening the complaint. Quota-like admissions also seem to exist at Yale, Princeton and elsewhere, and the feds won’t have litigation as an excuse to look the other way. But if the Obama Administration finds another excuse, as it probably will, Asian-Americans will need the Supreme Court to end their exclusion.http://www.wsj.com/articles/harvards-discrimination-dodge-1436397289

7/2/15 CNN: “Do Asian students face too much pressure?”
By Jeff Yang
They called Sara Kim the “Genius Girl.”
She was the prodigy whose academic prowess, perfect SATs and otherworldly STEM skills led first to the equivalent of a bidding war between Harvard and Stanford, and then to an unprecedented proposal in which Kim would be allowed to attend each school for two years before choosing the one from which she’d graduate. And add to that: Harvard enlisted no other than billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to try to recruit her to its campus.
And then, as suddenly as it erupted, the story imploded.
Harvard and Stanford declared that no such admission offer had been made, and that in fact Kim had not been accepted to either school.http://www.kesq.com/news/do-asian-students-face-too-much-pressure/33947516

7/1/15 Associated Press: “Ex-state senator pleads guilty to racketeering in California”
By Sudhin Thanawala
San Francisco (AP) — An ex-California state senator pleaded guilty Wednesday to a racketeering charge in an organized crime and public corruption case centered in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
Leland Yee could face a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison when he is sentenced in October after entering the plea to conspiracy to conduct and participate in affairs of an enterprise through a pattern of racketeering.http://www.seattlepi.com/news/crime/article/Plea-deal-appears-to-be-in-works-for-6359931.php

7/1/15 The College Fix: “Asian American studies professors stay silent on Asian vs. Black integration”
by Victoria Razzi, student at Syracuse University
An 80-year-old Duke University professor recently argued that Asian Americans have integrated into America better than African Americans, a controversial and contentious assertion that caused uproar and prompted the scholar to be labeled a racist.
With that, The College Fix repeatedly emailed more than 30 Asian American studies professors across America throughout June to get their take on the matter.
The response? Silence.

6/26/15 National Review: “Bobby Jindal and Liberals’ Racist Double-Standard”
by Kevin D. Williams
For his political conservatism Governor Jindal, like Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina and conservative activist Dinesh D’Souza, also Republicans of Indian origin, is savaged as an Uncle Tamas — an Indian guilty of acting white. The charge has been led by The New Republic.http://www.nationalreview.com/article/420332/bobby-jindal-liberal-racism-kevin-d-williamson

6/24/15 observer.com: “Asian-Americans Are Indeed Getting Screwed by Harvard (But Not How They Think): The Secret Quotas in College Admissions”
By Steve Cohen
A coalition of 64 Asian-American groups has filed a complaint against Harvard for discriminating against Asian-American applicants. They’re right to assume there is a quota system at work. But they’re wrong that it is targeting Asian-Americans. In fact, it is discriminating in favor of Blacks and Hispanics.
The Coalition’s complaint is based on a false assumption: that admissions decisions at elite colleges are based on smarts, as represented by high SAT scores and grades. Yes, those metrics count a lot. But they come into play only after an applicant’s “tag”—his or her target group—is assigned. That’s because top schools are not looking just for the smartest kids, or for well-rounded kids; they’re looking to put together the well-rounded class. Kids who will fill key niches on campus.Asian-Americans Are Indeed Getting Screwed by Harvard (But Not How They Think)

6/19/15 Verdict/Justia: “Some Preliminary Thoughts on the Lawsuits and Protests by Asian Groups and Individuals Alleging Unfair Treatment by College Admissions Offices”
by Vikram David Amar (law professor)
It is too early to say where these litigations and investigations might ultimately lead, and whether any universities will be found to have violated the law; much will depend, of course, on the facts that are established in these various proceedings. I make no predictions and express no views as to the appropriate outcomes of these disputes. But even at this early stage, it is appropriate to correct some fallacies of law and logic that have been expressed by various critics of the individuals and groups who have been raising complaints. In the space below, I identify and attempt to debunk three flawed criticisms in particular.https://verdict.justia.com/2015/06/19/some-preliminary-thoughts-on-the-lawsuits-and-protests-by-asian-groups-and-individuals-alleging-unfair-treatment-by-college-admissions-offices

6/16/15 Houston Chronicle: “Asian-Americans and the ‘bamboo ceiling’: The discrimination isn’t in schools. It’s in the workplace.”
by Jennifer Lee, via Zocalo Public Square
The complaint seems plausible, and it has ignited heated conversations about Asian-Americans and affirmative action. But, as a sociologist who has researched Asian-Americans, stereotypes, and the American education system, I can tell you the allegation is simply wrong, and the conversations tired and misguided. The group making the allegations – and too many other Americans – are looking at discrimination in the wrong setting. Where Asian-Americans face the discrimination is not in schools, but in the workplace.http://www.houstonchronicle.com/local/gray-matters/article/Asian-Americans-and-the-bamboo-ceiling-6328596.php

6/15/15 Salem, OR Statesman Journal: “Asian-Americans on the rise”
by Esther J. Cepeda
Chicago — Here’s a historic shift you probably haven’t heard about: For the first time in decades, Mexico is no longer the top source of recent immigrants to the United States.
China and India now lead the way, according to a new report from the Migration Policy Institute. This surprising turn has barely made headlines. Scattered news reports have noted the phenomenon, but no one seems to care.http://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/opinion/2015/06/14/asian-americans-rise/71217858/

6/15/15 Reuters: “Is Harvard really discriminating against Asian applicants?
An investigation reveals a broader agenda behind a recent lawsuit against Harvard”
In recent months, Harvard University has come under attack in court for allegedly limiting the number of Asian-American students it admits. A Reuters examination reveals how the lawsuit brought in their name arose from a broader goal: upending a nearly 40-year-old Supreme Court decision that has primarily helped blacks and Hispanics.http://www.metro.us/lifestyle/is-harvard-really-discriminating-against-asian-applicants/zsJofo—R2EoqXlxJ6Cug/

6/13/15 Economist: “Fighting back: What gangs can offer young Asian-Americans”
Atlanta: According to data from 2009 and 6,500 interviews with youngsters conducted by the Department of Justice and the Department of Education, Asian-American pupils are 20% more likely to face bullying in the classroom than their peers from other ethnic groups. Danny Eun, a music producer whose parents came to the city from Korea, says growing up in Atlanta was tough. “We were judged as either really trying to be white, or trying to be black,” he says. “Asian-Americans are just stereotyped as nerds.” For protection from bullies, many of his friends joined gangs.http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21654076-what-gangs-can-offer-young-asian-americans-fighting-back

6/10/15 Pope Center: “College Is Not a Theater”
By George Leef
Starting back in the 1970s, officials at America’s more selective colleges and universities began using racial preferences to increase the percentages of certain minority group students on campus. Preferences for certain groups, however, also means preferences against others.
Early in the last century, some of the top universities had a quota for Jewish students. Harvard, for example, capped their number because officials didn’t want to risk upsetting Boston traditionalists who might be disturbed to see Harvard become “too Jewish.” It didn’t matter that many of the Jewish students were academically superior to other applicants—officials just didn’t want to have too many.
These days, the un-preferred group is students of Asian ancestry. Rather than merely accepting that as their sacrifice for good educational policy, many Asian-Americans (how distressing is the imperative of putting individuals into hyphenated groups!) are now battling against the double standards that make it much harder for them to gain admission into the nation’s most prestigious schools.http://www.popecenter.org/commentaries/article.html?id=3204

6/9/15 Los Angeles Times: “Op-Ed The truth about ‘holistic’ college admissions”
By Sara Harberson
I worked in admissions at the University of Pennsylvania and at Franklin & Marshall College, and I can tell you something about what goes on. Elite universities — public and private — practice what is called “holistic admissions,” a policy based on the idea that a test score or GPA does not completely reflect who a student is and what he or she can bring to a college community. It allows a college to factor in a student’s background, challenges overcome, extracurricular involvement, letters of recommendation, special talents, writing ability and many other criteria. Private schools and many public universities can include race among the characteristics they consider, as long as they don’t apply racial quotas.
Has holistic admissions become a guise for allowing cultural and even racial biases to dictate the admissions process? To some degree, yes.
A tag is the proverbial golden ticket for a student applying to an elite institution. A tag identifies a student as a high priority for the institution. Typically students with tags are recruited athletes, children of alumni, children of donors or potential donors, or students who are connected to the well connected. The lack of a tag can hinder an otherwise strong, high-achieving student. Asian American students typically don’t have these tags.http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-harberson-asian-american-admission-rates-20150609-story.html

On June 8, 2015, U.S. Representatives Ed Royce (R-Calif.) and Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) publicly released their letter to the U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Department of Justice concerning the Administrative Complaint filed by over 60 Asian-American groups against Harvard for its discrimination against Asian American applicants.http://royce.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=397714

6/5/15 Wall Street Journal: “Harvard’s Chinese Exclusion Act: An immigrant businessman explains his legal challenge to racial quotas that keep Asian-Americans out of elite colleges”
By Kate Bachelder
Getting into Harvard is tough enough: Every year come the stories about applicants who built toilets in developing countries, performed groundbreaking lunar research, or won national fencing competitions, whatever it takes to edge out the competition. So you can imagine that the 52-year-old Florida businessman and author Yukong Zhao is incensed that gaining admission may be even harder for his children—because of their race.
“It’s not a political issue,” he says. “It’s a civil-rights issue.”
Mr. Zhao helped organize 64 groups that last month asked the Education Department to investigate Harvard University for discriminating against Asian-Americans in admissions. The allegation is that Harvard is holding Asian-Americans to higher standards to keep them from growing as a percentage of the student body. The complaint, filed also with the Justice Department, follows a lawsuit against the university last fall by the nonprofit Students for Fair Admissions.
First, a few facts. Asian-Americans are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population, and the share of college-age Asian-Americans climbed to 5.1% in 2011 from 3% in 1990. Yet according to independent research cited in the complaint, members of this 5% make up roughly 30% of National Merit semifinalists, a distinction earned by high-school students based on PSAT scores. Asian-American students seem to win a similar share of the Education Department’s Presidential Scholar awards, “one of the nation’s highest honors for high-school students,” as the website puts it. By any standard, Asian-Americans have made remarkable gains since 1950. They constituted 0.2% of the U.S. population then, due in part to the legacy of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.http://www.wsj.com/articles/harvards-chinese-exclusion-act-1433543969

6/5/15 New York Post: “The insane identity-politics assault on ‘Aloha’”
By Michelle Malkin
Let’s set aside whether Cameron Crowe’s new movie, “Aloha,” is a good or bad movie.
Whatever the flick’s merits or demerits, it has inadvertently helped expose the arbitrary, capricious and ridiculous demands of militant identity politics.http://nypost.com/2015/06/05/the-insane-identity-politics-assault-on-aloha/

6/4/15 WDRB: “Prosecutor suspended while County Attorney’s office investigates conduct”
By Jason Riley
Louisville, Ky., (WDRB) — Just a day after being criticized for being too lenient on a prosecutor accused of making derogatory comments, the Jefferson County Attorney’s office has suspended the prosecutor in light of new allegations.
County Attorney Mike O’Connell on Thursday suspended prosecutor Karl Price without pay pending a review of “disturbing” conduct cited in an article by Courier-Journal reporter Andrew Wolfson.
On May 22, while working a civil case in his private practice, Price wrote a letter to an attorney representing Hwang’s, calling the family “greedy foreigners who simply did not understand simple contract relations,” according to a disciplinary letter released Wednesday.
In the May 22 letter, which was first revealed by the Kentucky Trial Court Review, Price also wrote that the Asian-American owners of Hwang’s were “relying on some Asian principal” for not agreeing to settle the case.http://www.wdrb.com/story/29229437/prosecutor-punished-for-referring-to-asian-american-business-owners-as-greedy-foreigners

6/2/15 Breitbart.com: “Asian-American Files Complaint Against Ivy League Schools, Alleges Discrimination”
by William Bigelow
In another telling hint that universities are discriminating against Asian-Americans, Michael Wang, who notched a perfect ACT score, a 2230 SAT, a 4.67 weighted grade point average and 13 Advanced Placement courses on his resume, was rejected by seven Ivy League universities and Stanford in 2013. The only Ivy League school to accept him was the University of Pennsylvania.
Wang filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education, charging Yale, Stanford, and Princeton with discrimination. In May, roughly 60 Asian-American groups filed a lawsuit against Harvard charging Harvard and other Ivy League schools with using racial quotas to lock out Asian-Americans. Another group, Students for Fair Admissions, filed suits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, charging them with racial discrimination against Asian-Americans. The Wall Street Journal wrote a piece describing Asian-Americans as “The New Jews of Harvard Admissions.”http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/06/02/asian-american-files-complaint-against-ivy-league-schools-alleges-discrimination/

6/1/15 Business Insider: “A perfect ACT score couldn’t get this student into Yale, Princeton, or Stanford, and he says it’s because he’s Asian-American”
by Abby Jackson
With a perfect ACT score and 13 Advanced Placement courses under his belt, Michael Wang applied to seven Ivy League universities and Stanford in 2013.
An Asian-American, Wang suspected his race might work against him. But he was still shocked when he was rejected by Stanford and every Ivy League school except for the University of Pennsylvania.http://www.businessinsider.com/michael-wang-says-ivy-league-discriminates-against-asians-2015-5

6/1/15 Boston Globe: “To get into elite colleges, some advised to ‘appear less Asian’; As lawsuits allege racial quotas at elite colleges, high-achieving applicants call on consultants to help win admission — and receive guidance on minimizing their ethnicity”
By Bella English
Brian Taylor is director of Ivy Coach, a Manhattan company that advises families on how to get their students into elite colleges. A number of his clients are Asian American, and Taylor is frank about his strategy for them.
“While it is controversial, this is what we do,’’ he says. “We will make them appear less Asian when they apply.”https://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/2015/06/01/college-counselors-advise-some-asian-students-appear-less-asian/Ew7g4JiQMiqYNQlIwqEIuO/story.html

5/29/15 Entertainment Weekly: “I’m not buying Emma Stone as an Asian-American in Aloha”
by Chris Lee
Accepting Emma Stone as an Asian-American in Aloha requires a certain suspension of disbelief and no small amount of magical thinking. In the Hawaii-set romantic comedy-drama, she portrays Allison Ng: an aggressively peppy Air Force fighter pilot of Chinese-Hawaiian-Swedish decent who falls for an existentially angst-y military contractor played by Bradley Cooper.http://www.ew.com/article/2015/05/29/im-not-buying-emma-stone-asian-american

5/28/15 KHON: “‘Aloha’ movie criticized by Native Hawaiian, Asian American groups”
By Manolo Morales and Web Staff
The movie “Aloha” opens in theaters this weekend and features A-list actors like Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone and Rachel McAdams.
Native Hawaiians say the title is disrespectful while an Asian American watchdog group questions why Asian actors weren’t given any substantial roles.
Guy Aoki is a former Hawaii resident who is now the founding president of the watchdog group Media Action Network for Asian Americans.
As far as Asian characters, in the credits, they’re billed as “Indian pedestrian, upscale Japanese tourist, upscale restaurant guest, I mean these are people who don’t even have names so you know that their parts are not gonna be very big,” he said.
Aoki is asking the people of Hawaii to boycott the movie because otherwise it would encourage more filmmakers to make movies about Hawaii without using Asian actors.
“It’s an insult to the people of Hawaii that filmmakers come in and they want to use the lush background and they want to talk the culture as if they understand the culture and yet they don’t want to use the people who created the culture which are Asian or Pacific Islanders,” said Aoki.‘Aloha’ movie criticized by Native Hawaiian, Asian American groups

5/27/15 NBC News: “Was Race A Factor in Sherry Chen’s Espionage Case?”
by Frances Kai-Hwa Wang
US Congressional leaders and Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) advocacy organizations including Committee of 100 and OCA – Asian Pacific American Advocates have called for a US Department of Justice investigation into whether National Weather Service hydrologist Sherry Chen may have been targeted for her race and national origin in now-dropped charges of alleged economic espionage.http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/was-race-factor-sherry-chens-espionage-case-n364886

5/25/15 UCLA Daily Bruin: “Letter to the Editor: Daily Bruin column distorts Asian American views on affirmative action”
by Vijay Ingam
Dear Editor,
I am writing in response to Arthur Wang’s article concerning Asian American opinions on affirmative action. Mr. Wang’s article incorrectly surmises that Asian Americans support affirmative action, based on biased polling and the opinions of left-leaning advocacy groups.
I worked in market research, and I know how easy it is to draw incorrect conclusions based on deceptive survey data. I have written a blog post contesting UC Riverside professor Karthick Ramakrishnan’s conclusions, as did the Los Angeles Times. The 135 organizations that Mr. Wang considers more representative of Asian American views are left-wing advocacy groups. Neither the polls nor the groups Wang cites are unbiased representatives of Asian American opinion.
The affirmative action issue touches me personally because in 1999, I posed as black in my application to medical school – I am Indian-American – and gained admission at Saint Louis University, despite my low college GPA. Affirmative action impacts the lives of thousands of UCLA graduates who apply to graduate schools every year. According to figures published by the American Association of Medical Colleges, if I did the same thing and applied to medical school as black instead of Asian between 2013 and 2015, with my GPA of 3.1 and Medical College Admission Test score of 31, I would have increased my chances of admission from 17 percent to 74 percent.
The undeniable statistical fact is that affirmative action is racial discrimination in admissions against Asians and whites.
The California State Legislature understood that it declined to overturn Proposition 209 because of the opposition by Asian Americans.
Sincerely,
Vijay Jojo Chokal-Ingam
UCLA alumnushttp://dailybruin.com/2015/05/25/submission-daily-bruin-column-distorts-asian-american-views-on-affirmative-action/

5/24/15 The Guardian: “Why are so many Asian Americans missing out on Ivy League schools?”
by Nicky Woolf
Experts say elite universities in the US are discriminating against Asian American candidates almost wholesale. This month, a coalition of 64 Asian American associations and civil rights groups, supported by students including Wang, filed a lawsuit against Harvard for what it sees as discriminatory admissions practices.
According to Daniel Golden, the author of The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges – and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates, SAT grades that would be perfectly adequate for a non-Asian student are colloquially called an “Asian fail”.
“The issue basically is that Asian Americans need better academic credentials than members of other groups to get into elite universities,” Golden said.
Edward Blum, president of Students for Fair Admissions, a group that fights for fairness in admissions processes and has a separate Harvard lawsuit pending, said that “at least 100” students who had been rejected from Harvard and other universities on the basis, he believed, of their race were on board with his group’s suit.
While the number of Asian American applicants to Harvard has almost tripled in the past two decades, Blum said, there were actually fewer Asian American students admitted to the university in 2012 than in 1992.
He said he had spoken to more than 700 students and parents, who “expressed their grave disappointment with Harvard and the other Ivy League schools when they see that their grades, their test scores, their athletic activities and their extracurricular activities are better and stronger than many of their classmates who are white, African American and Hispanic, who are admitted to the Ivy League schools whereas they are denied.”
He said the lawsuit was currently in discovery, and that while there was currently no “smoking gun” document showing that quotas exist, the data is clear.
Both Blum and Golden compared the situation to that faced by Jewish prospective students in the first half of the 20th century.
“Jews were overrepresented in the student body compared to the population, but they were underrepresented compared to their academic credentials,” Golden said.
“Admissions officers in those days were more candid and said pretty clearly they felt it would be harmful to have too many Jews in the student body – I don’t think it’s all that different.
“And my feeling is,” he added, “some day people will look back and say, ‘How could we have let this discrimination against Asian Americans persist for so long?’”http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/24/why-are-so-many-missing-out-on-ivy-league-schools

5/24/15 The Guardian: “Why are so many Asian Americans missing out on Ivy League schools?”
by Nicky Woolf
Experts say elite universities in the US are discriminating against Asian American candidates almost wholesale. This month, a coalition of 64 Asian American associations and civil rights groups, supported by students including Wang, filed a lawsuit against Harvard for what it sees as discriminatory admissions practices.
The complaint, which was filed on 15 May, alleges that Asian Americans, “because of their race, have been unfairly rejected by Harvard College because of such unlawful use of race in the admissions process”.
According to Daniel Golden, the author of The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges – and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates, SAT grades that would be perfectly adequate for a non-Asian student are colloquially called an “Asian fail”.
“The issue basically is that Asian Americans need better academic credentials than members of other groups to get into elite universities,” Golden said.
Edward Blum, president of Students for Fair Admissions, a group that fights for fairness in admissions processes and has a separate Harvard lawsuit pending, said that “at least 100” students who had been rejected from Harvard and other universities on the basis, he believed, of their race were on board with his group’s suit.
While the number of Asian American applicants to Harvard has almost tripled in the past two decades, Blum said, there were actually fewer Asian American students admitted to the university in 2012 than in 1992.
He said he had spoken to more than 700 students and parents, who “expressed their grave disappointment with Harvard and the other Ivy League schools when they see that their grades, their test scores, their athletic activities and their extracurricular activities are better and stronger than many of their classmates who are white, African American and Hispanic, who are admitted to the Ivy League schools whereas they are denied.”
“It’s a grave disappointment to this country for these young, often first-generation immigrant Asians to know that they have to do so much better than their classmates in order to be admitted to one of these competitive universities,” Blum said.
Both Blum and Golden compared the situation to that faced by Jewish prospective students in the first half of the 20th century.
“Jews were overrepresented in the student body compared to the population, but they were underrepresented compared to their academic credentials,” Golden said.
“Admissions officers in those days were more candid and said pretty clearly they felt it would be harmful to have too many Jews in the student body – I don’t think it’s all that different.
“And my feeling is,” he added, “some day people will look back and say, ‘How could we have let this discrimination against Asian Americans persist for so long?’”http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/24/why-are-so-many-missing-out-on-ivy-league-schools

5/22/15 Chicago Tribune: “Harvard’s odd quota on Asian-Americans”
by Steve Chapman
Asian-Americans are one of the nation’s most astonishing success stories. In 1960, they accounted for less than 1 percent of the U.S. population but had a rich history of persecution — from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Back then, no one could have imagined what lay ahead.
Today, nearly 5 percent of Americans have Asian ancestry, tracing to countries from India to Japan. The Pew Research Center reports that they are “the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States.”
They are over-represented in fields like medicine, engineering and computer science. In Silicon Valley, they hold half of the tech jobs. For immigrants once associated with menial or subservient work, the transformation has been titanic.
But some things have stayed the same — such as the representation of Asian-Americans at Harvard, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious university. In 1992, they made up 19.1 percent of the undergraduate student body. In 2013, they made up 18 percent.
During the same period, the share of Asian-Americans in the U.S. population rose sharply, and their share in the Harvard applicant pool doubled. About 30 percent of those admitted, by comparison, are “legacies” — students whose notable virtue is carrying the DNA of Harvard grads.
Today, according to a survey by The Harvard Crimson, Asian-American freshmen had higher SAT scores than any other ethnic group. It’s not enough for them to be as good as everyone else: To get in, they have to be considerably better.
The problem seems to be that, in the absence of measures to limit their representation, there would just be too many Asian-Americans. So, from all outward appearances, Harvard has a quota to prevent that unwanted result.
Not all elite universities follow suit. At the California Institute of Technology, reported Ron Unz in The American Conservative magazine, Asian-Americans are now nearly 40 percent of the student body. Likewise at the University of California at Berkeley, where racial preferences are against state law. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the figure is 30 percent.http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chapman/ct-asians-enrollment-harvard-colleges-perspec-0524-20150522-column.html

5/22/15 MiamiHerald.com: “Former state senator Edmond Gong dies at 84; State Rep and Senator: Edmond Joseph “Eddie” Gong, Miami-born son of Chinese immigrants, was the first Asian-American elected to the Florida legislature, serving as both a representative and senator, from 1963 to 1972.”
By Howard Cohen
Edmond “Eddie” Gong grew up in a Miami that was much different than the metropolis it has become. He was determined to help shape its growth.
Born to Chinese immigrants who owned small grocery stores in the Overtown area, Gong, a product of the Miami-Dade public school system and a Harvard-educated lawyer, was elected to the Florida House of Representatives in 1963, served until 1966, and became a state senator in 1966, reelected through 1972.http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/obituaries/article21603849.html

5/19/15 Wall Street Journal: “The New Jews of Harvard Admissions: Asian-Americans are rebelling over evidence that they are held to a much higher standard, but elite colleges deny using quotas”
By Jason L. Riley
Last year’s Supreme Court decision upholding Michigan’s ban on racial preferences in public-university admissions included a passionate dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who argued that such policies benefit “racial minorities,” by which she means blacks and Hispanics. Nowhere in Justice Sotomayor’s 58-page opinion will you find any mention of how affirmative action affects Asian-Americans, the fastest-growing racial group in the country. The omission is common among defenders of campus double standards for favored minorities, and it’s starting to annoy an increasing number of Asian-Americans. This is progress.
A coalition of more than 60 Chinese, Indian, Korean and Pakistani organizations is asking the U.S. departments of Justice and Education to investigate possible racial bias in undergraduate admissions at Harvard. The complaint announced on Friday, echoing a lawsuit filed by another group in November, accuses Harvard and other elite institutions of holding Asian-Americans to far higher standards than other applicants, a practice used to limit the number of Jewish students at Ivy League schools in the first half of the 20th century.
Citing several academic studies, the complaint notes that Asians have some of the highest academic credentials but the lowest acceptance rates at the nation’s top schools, a result that the coalition attributes to “just-for-Asians admissions standards that impose unfair and illegal burdens on Asian-American college applicants.” A 2009 paper by Princeton sociologists Thomas J. Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford found that “Asian-Americans have the lowest acceptance rate for each SAT test score bracket, having to score on average approximately 140 points higher than a white student, 270 points higher than a Hispanic student and 450 points higher than a black student on the SAT to be on equal footing.”
Chunyan Li, a professor of accounting at Pace University and a coalition organizer of the administrative complaint, said: “In the past 20 years our population has doubled,” she said, but the percentage of Asians admitted to elite schools “has been capped artificially low.”
There is strong evidence that racial balance is the highest priority at schools like Harvard, and holistic admissions are used to obscure the racial bean-counting necessary to obtain the desired racial mix. At the California Institute of Technology, a selective private college that uses color-blind admissions, Asian enrollment grew steadily to 42.5% in 2013 from 29.8% two decades earlier, reflecting the nation’s growing Asian population. At Harvard, Asian enrollment consistently remained between 14.3% and 18.4%. Harvard would have us believe that this remarkable consistency in the percentages of Asian (and other racial and ethnic groups) on campus has been achieved without quotas.
In 1995 Asian freshman enrollment at the University of California, Berkeley, stood at 37%. The next year California made it illegal for state universities to consider race in admissions, and inside of a decade Berkeley’s freshman class was nearly 47% Asian. UCLA experienced a similar spike in Asian undergrads over the same period, suggesting that the California schools had been doing what Harvard allegedly is still doing.
Last year the California legislature moved to reverse the ban on race-based admissions, but Asian-American lawmakers, primarily at the urging of their Asian constituents, pushed back hard. The legislative leadership dropped the matter. Ms. Li said the episode alerted many of her fellow activists: “That opened up many people’s eyes. They saw it as going backward. These race-based admissions policies pit one group against another.”http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-jews-of-harvard-admissions-1432077157

5/19/15 Washington Post: “Which political leader expressed concern about California universities ‘fill[ing] their entire freshman classes with nothing but Asian Americans’”
By Eugene Volokh
The answer is President Bill Clinton, in 1995, when Prop. 209 was being discussed in California. Prop. 209, which was enacted the following year, banned race and sex preferences in public education, employment, and contracting. From Leon Rennert [Bee Washington Bureau Chief], Sacramento Bee, April 7, 1995, at A1 (quoting an exclusive interview with The Bee):
“Our diversity is our great strength,” [President Clinton] declared. “If a university says, ‘Look, we’re only going to let in qualified people, but we think that the life of the university will be strengthened if we had different kinds of people,’ then I think that’s a legitimate thing.”
Otherwise, he added, “there are universities in California that could fill their entire freshman classes with nothing but Asian Americans.”
I was reminded of this by the news about Asian-American groups filing a complaint with the Justice Department and the Department of Education, claiming that Harvard is discriminating against Asians in admissions (and discriminating against them in favor of whites, not just engaging in the more familiar preferential treatment of black and Hispanic applicants). I don’t know whether the factual allegations against Harvard are correct — but if some people are shocked to imagine that Harvard would do such a thing, it’s worth noting how well such discrimination fits in the overall rhetoric of “diversity” and “campuses that look like America,” and how openly some liberal leaders have expressed concerns about race-neutral admissions leading to “too many Asians.”
Likewise, here’s a quote from Aug. 10, 1995, from Richard Der, executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action, arguing that Asians should support race-based university admissions preferences:
If Asian-Americans want to go to segregated schools where students are mostly Asian, then they should enroll in universities in Asia.
And here’s liberal CNN’s “Crossfire” co-host Bob Beckel, questioning Abigail Thernstrom (an opponent of race preferences in university admissions) on May 25, 1997:
You just mentioned Asians — let’s assume for a moment — who are doing much better in their scoring than average than even whites are. If merit — this things, merit, which is most grades and tests are what is used here, would you like to see these UCLA Law School 80 percent Asian? Because at the rate it is going, let me just give you the percentages. The rate it’s going, an increase of 80 students by the year 2007, 80 percent of the UCLA Law School will be Asian. Will that make you happy?
Now both of these quotes are somewhat hyperbolic — though universities of course could fill their freshman classes with Asian Americans, race-blind admissions would not lead to such an outcome, and UCLA School of Law is not 80 percent Asian, even though race preferences in admission have been illegal in California for 20 years. But if 80 percent of the law school became Asian, I would be no more or less happy than I am now. I don’t expect universities to “look like America” or “look like California,” just as I don’t expect my colleagues (who are disproportionately Jewish, as is the case at many law schools) to “worship like California.” Nor do I think that whatever benefits might be provided by the “diversity” that stems from more representation of certain racial groups exceed the very grave costs that are imposed by racial discrimination in admissions, whether the discrimination is against Asians, whites, blacks, Hispanics, or anyone else.
On the other hand, if 80 percent of my law school became Asian because Asians were doing so well on their grades and on tests, I — as a parent, not a teacher — would ask myself: How did this happen? What are Asian parents and children doing that is letting them succeed so well? And how can my children and I do the same?
Eugene Volokh teaches free speech law, religious freedom law, church-state relations law, a First Amendment Amicus Brief Clinic, and tort law, at UCLA School of Law, where he has also often taught copyright law, criminal law, and a seminar on firearms regulation policy.https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=http://img.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp-content/uploads/sites/14/2014/01/volokh.jpg&w=180&h=180

5/18/15 Associated Press: Duke professor criticized for comments says it is not racist to compare blacks, Asians
By Jonathan Drew
Raleigh, N.C. — A Duke University professor criticized for an online post comparing blacks and Asians said Monday that it’s not racist to discuss what he sees as differences in how the groups have performed in the U.S. over the past few decades.
Political science professor Jerry Hough has been sharply criticized for a response he posted in the online comments section of the New York Times editorial “How Racism Doomed Baltimore,” dated May 9. The 80-year-old professor, who is white, has been on an unrelated academic leave for the past school year.
In his online comments, Hough wrote that Asians have been described as “yellow races” and faced discrimination in 1965 at least as bad as blacks experienced. Of Asian-Americans, he wrote: “They didn’t feel sorry for themselves, but worked doubly hard.”
The posting goes on to say: “I am a professor at Duke University. Every Asian student has a very simple old American first name that symbolizes their desire for integration. Virtually every black has a strange new name that symbolizes their lack of desire for integration.”http://www.startribune.com/duke-professor-defends-comments-comparing-blacks-asians/304137361/

5/18/15 Washington Times: “A ‘pivot’ toward Asian Americans; The 2016 presidential candidates need to reckon with a growing demographic”
By Susan Au Allen
Presidential contenders of both parties are advised to should are advised to take note: The Asian American community is the nation’s fastest-growing demographic group, with China and India superseding Mexico as the countries of origin for recent immigrants, and members of this “model minority” are gradually overtaking their fellow Americans in education and income.
And their votes are up for grabs in 2016.http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/may/18/susan-au-allen-presidential-candidates-should-pivo/

5/17/15 2015 NPR: “Often Employees, Rarely CEOs: Challenges Asian-Americans Face In Tech”
A new report on diversity in Silicon Valley shows that Asians and Asian-Americans are well-represented in lower-level positions — but, in comparison, severely underrepresented at the management and executive levels at five large, established tech companies.
Ascend, an Asian-American professional organization based in New York, found that although 27 percent of professionals working at those companies are Asian or Asian-American, fewer than 19 percent of managers, and just under 14 percent of executives, are.http://www.npr.org/2015/05/17/407478606/often-employees-rarely-ceos-challenges-asian-americans-face-in-tech

5/15/15 PRI’s The World: “How many Asian Hollywood stars can you name? Right, it’s not easy”
By Naomi Gingold
There are a lot of dating clichés. Some that are backed up with data. Like the one that says Asian American men are thought of and see themselves as one of the least desirable groups. To quote some recent articles: Are Asian Men Undateable? Why Won’t Western Women Date Chinese Men?
John Cho is one of the few prominent Asian American male actors in Hollywood. You might recognize him from the Harold and Kumar movies or the recent Star Trek blockbusters.
In ABC’s “Selfie,” John Cho represented a rarity: an Asian American in a romantic lead on network television.
He says that when he was younger, “Girls would say, in an almost benevolent tone, that they just had zero attraction to Asian men. It wasn’t considered taboo to say something like that.”
Now, with all due journalistic objectivity here, John Cho is hot. In 2009, People Magazine voted him sexiest man alive. But in Hollywood, it’s still rare to see Asian men cast as confident, leading men. Hollywood hasn’t wanted to date them. And that impacts what America thinks of Asian men. And what Asian American men think of themselves.http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-05-15/how-many-asian-hollywood-stars-can-you-name-right-its-not-easy

5/15/15 Wall Street Journal: “Harvard Accused of Bias Against Asian-Americans; Complaint alleges university sets higher bar for applicants to limit Asian enrollment”
By Douglas Belkin
A complaint Friday alleged that Harvard University discriminates against Asian-American applicants by setting a higher bar for admissions than that faced by other groups.
The complaint, filed by a coalition of 64 organizations, says the university has set quotas to keep the numbers of Asian-American students significantly lower than the quality of their applications merits. It cites third-party academic research on the SAT exam showing that Asian-Americans have to score on average about 140 points higher than white students, 270 points higher than Hispanic students and 450 points higher than African-American students to equal their chances of gaining admission to Harvard. The exam is scored on a 2400-point scale.
The complaint was filed with the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights.
Robert Iuliano, Harvard’s general counsel, said the percentage of Asian-American students admitted to the undergraduate school rose to 21% from less than 18% in the past decade.
But the group that filed the complaint said that percentage should be much higher given the increasing numbers of Asian-American students that apply.
Yukong Zhao, a 52-year-old Chinese-American author who helped organize the coalition, said there are longtime stereotypes of Asian applicants’ being “not creative enough or risk-taking enough, but that’s not true. Nearly half of the tech start-ups in the country were started by Asian-Americans. Every one is a great example of creativity, and risk-taking and leadership.”
The complaint argues that elite schools “that use race-neutral admissions” have far higher Asian-American enrollment than Harvard. At California Institute of Technology, for instance, about 40% of undergraduates are Asian-American, about twice that at Harvard.http://www.wsj.com/articles/asian-american-organizations-seek-federal-probe-of-harvard-admission-policies-1431719348

5/15/15 Boston Globe: “Harvard faces bias complaint from Asian-American groups”
By Janet Lorin
A coalition of more than 60 Asian-American groups filed a federal discrimination complaint against Harvard University, claiming racial bias in undergraduate admissions.
Asian-American students with almost perfect college entrance-exam scores, top 1 percent grade-point averages, academic awards and leadership positions are more likely to be rejected than similar applicants of other races, according to their administrative complaint, filed Friday with the US Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. Harvard denies any discrimination.
Their complaint, also filed with the US Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, reflects longstanding concern among academically high-performing Asian-Americans that they are held to a higher admissions standard at elite US colleges. While they represent about 6 percent of the US population and 21 percent of students admitted to Harvard’s freshman class this fall, they say they are being subjected to the kind of quotas that kept many Jews out of the same institutions in the first half of the 20th century.
Last year, Asian-Americans had the highest mean scores of any racial group on the math and writing sections of the SAT college entrance exam, according to the College Board, the New York nonprofit that administers the exam. On the reading section, they outscore all but white students, whom they lagged only slightly on average. They also win more than their share of academic competitions, the complaint said.
The coalition cited research from a 2009 book co-authored by Thomas Espenshade, an economist and senior scholar at the office of Population Research at Princeton University.
If all other credentials are equal, Asian-Americans need to score 140 points more than whites, 270 points higher than Hispanics, and 450 points above African-Americans out of a maximum 1,600 on the math and reading SAT to have the same chance of admission to a private college, the book found.http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/05/15/harvard-faces-admissions-bias-complaint-from-asian-americans/gILV3A3eWCxIGSNzMQUbZK/story.html

5/14/15 Orange County Weekly: “Activists: Harvard Discriminates Against Asian-American Students in Admissions Process”
By Kristine Hoang
According to enrollment data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the percentage of Asian-Americans who enrolled at Harvard decreased by over 50 percent over the last two decades even though the Asian-American population nearly doubled between 1992 and 2011. At the same time, Asian-American enrollment at the California Institute of Technology, which is also highly selective, has grown proportionally with the Asian-American population growth.
Research by Thomas J. Espenshade, Senior Scholar and Sociology professor at Princeton University, suggests that if race wasn’t considered in university admissions, Asian applicants would be the “biggest winners.” He writes:
Asian candidates are at a disadvantage in admission compared to their white, African-American, and Hispanic counterpart. Removing this disadvantage at the same time preferences for African Americans and Hispanics are eliminated results in a significant gain in the acceptance rate for Asian students–from 17.6 percent to 23.4 percent. Asians, who comprised 29.5 percent of total applicants in 1997, would make up 31.5 percent of accepted students in the simulation, compared with an actual proportion of 23.7 percent.http://blogs.ocweekly.com/navelgazing/2015/05/the_orange_club_chapman.php

5/12/15 http://www.asianjournal.com: “Asian American voters to double by 2040”
By Christina Oriel
THE Asian American electorate in the United States is expected to double by 2040, a new study by the University of California, Los Angeles revealed.
According to the new report entitled “The Future of Asian America in 2040,” over 6 million more Asian Americans will be registered to vote, bringing the electorate to a total of 12.2 million.
Currently, Asian Americans are only 4 percent of all registered voters in the US. By 2040, they will be nearly 7 percent, or 1 in 15 registered voters will be Asian American.http://asianjournal.com/news/asian-american-voters-to-double-by-2040/

5/9/15 New York Times: “Accused of Spying for China, Until She Wasn’t”
By Nicole Perlroth
On Monday, Oct. 20, 2014, Sherry Chen drove, as usual, to her office at the National Weather Service in Wilmington, Ohio, where she forecast flood threats along the Ohio River. She was a bit jet-lagged, having returned a few days earlier from a visit to China. But as she headed to her desk, she says, she had no reason to think it was anything other than an ordinary day. Then her boss summoned her.
Once inside his office, a back door opened and in walked six agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

5/7/15 asamnews.com: “Asian American Electorate to More than Double by 2040”
A new report released today by the UCLA Study for the Center for Inequality and the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies (APAICS) shows that by 2040 the Asian American electorate will more than double, and grow by 107%.

5/6/15 Los Angeles Times: “Tech’s glass ceiling nearly four times harder for Asian Americans to crack: New report finds that Asian Americans in tech face executive glass ceiling”
By Tracey Lien
Asian Americans are often considered the “successful minority” in tech. But that success has limits.
In an industry plagued by diversity issues, Asian Americans make up roughly a third of the workforce at Google, Yahoo and Facebook, according to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics figures. That far outpaces blacks and Latinos, who combined made up only single digits.
Although Asian Americans may be well represented in the workforce, they are severely underrepresented at the executive levels, according to a report released Wednesday by the Ascend Foundation, a nonprofit Pan-Asian membership organization for business professionals.http://documents.latimes.com/hidden-plain-sight-asians-americans-silicon-valley/

4/29/15 Staten Island Live: “Albany bill to change admission to Staten Island Tech is off the table”
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — A bill in the state Legislature that would have allowed the city to change admission criteria to Staten Island Technical High School in New Dorp, as well as Stuyvesant High School in lower Manhattan, and the remainder of the city’s eight specialized high schools, is off the table.http://www.silive.com/news/index.ssf/2015/04/bill_to_change_admission_polic.html

4/24/15 Wall Street Journal: “It Happened Here: About 70% of the 120,000 Japanese-Americans held were citizens. Some 2,300 would fight for their country.”
By John Fabian Witt
In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published a dystopian novel about an America turned fascist, run by racist demagogues and littered with concentration camps. Lewis titled his novel “It Can’t Happen Here.” Six years later, something very much like it did. “Infamy,” Richard Reeves’s book on Japanese-American internment in World War II, brings out the tragic foolishness and vicious anti-Japanese sentiment underlying the forcible detention of 120,000 people in inhospitable and sometimes brutal camps.http://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-infamy-by-richard-reeves-1429904122?cb=logged0.6784337814767334

4/23/15 fusion.net: “Of 800 main cast members on 100 network TV shows, just 52 (6%) are of Asian descent”
by Molly Fitzpatrick
This week, the first season finale of Fresh Off the Boat aired on ABC. (Full disclosure: Fusion is a joint venture of Univision and ABC. Hey, ABC.) Based on the memoir of the same name by restaurateur Eddie Huang — who serves as the show’s narrator, despite his displeasure with its departures from his life story — the ’90s-set sitcom follows a rap-obsessed 11-year-old (Hudson Yang) and his Taiwanese-American family in suburban Orlando.

4/23/15 Minneapolis Star Tribune: “HUD: Twin Cities landlord rejected Hmong family, noting mom’s poor English”
by Paul Walsh
A Twin Cities property manager refused to rent to Hmong family members, trying to charge them for translation expenses and pointing to language limitations for rejecting them as tenants, according to allegations filed by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.http://www.startribune.com/local/west/300964381.html

4/22/15 Wall Street Journal: “An Immigrant’s Tale, From Saigon in ’75 to American Entrepreneur:
My family was evacuated as the Vietnam War ended. Would today’s Republican Party have welcomed us?”
By Francis Hoang
Forty years ago on April 23, with the fall of South Vietnam to the Communists imminent, my family was evacuated to the United States. About 130,000 other fortunate refugees came to America that spring after Congress and President Ford granted us special “parole” status and provided funding for resettlement. My family arrived with almost nothing—no money, no jobs, no college degrees and no clear idea of our future.http://www.wsj.com/articles/an-immigrants-tale-from-saigon-in-75-to-american-entrepreneur-1429743611

4/20/15 Inside Higher Ed: “Which Groups Are Favored?”
By Scott Jaschik
Last week a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences stunned many with its conclusion that women are more likely than men to be hired for faculty positions in science, mathematics and technology. To many who are familiar with the widespread reports of bias against women in STEM, the findings just didn’t make sense.
Black and Latino Ph.D.s were more likely to be hired promptly than were white doctorate recipients. Asian doctoral recipients, in turn, were “significantly less likely” to be hired than were white doctoral recipients. The authors speculate that this reflects the relatively small number of black and Latino Ph.D. recipients in STEM and policies at many colleges and universities designed to encourage hiring of minority professors. Asian Ph.D.s do not benefit, because they “continue to be overrepresented,” the paper says, given that they make up 8.4 percent of full-time faculty members and 5.6 percent of the U.S. population.https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/04/20/new-research-which-groups-are-more-likely-be-hired-and-receive-tenure-stem

4/16/15 Bensonhurst Bean: “Asian American Activists Call For Multi-City Rallies In Support Of Indicted NYPD Officer Peter Liang”
By Rachel Silberstein
Police carDenouncing the prosecution of NYPD Officer Peter Liang — whose ricochetting bullet fatally hit unarmed black man Akai Gurley in the dark stairwell of a Brooklyn housing project — a group of Asian American civil rights leaders and activists have announced a national day of protest to be held next weekend.

4/15/15 New York Times: “With an Influx of Newcomers, Little Chinatowns Dot a Changing Brooklyn”
By Liz Robbins
With Chinese immigrants now the second largest foreign-born group in the city and soon to overtake Dominicans for the top spot, they are reshaping neighborhoods far beyond their traditional enclaves.
Nowhere is the rapid growth of the city’s Chinese population more pronounced than in Brooklyn.

4/5/15 National Review: “Smash the ‘Bamboo Ceiling’ of Racial Quotas”
by John Fund
One Indian American says he overcame anti-Asian bias and got into med school by claiming he was black. . . .
A group of Asian-American students has filed suit against Harvard’s admissions policy, charging that it seeks to limit the number of Asian students much like quotas held down the number of Jewish students until the 1920s. For example, one of the students Harvard rejected, an unnamed child of Chinese immigrants, had perfect scores on three college-admission tests, graduated first in his (or her) class, led the tennis team, and raised money for National Public Radio. . . .
But at the three most selective Ivy League schools, there is a clear anomaly: Asian Americans were over 27 percent of applicants to those schools between 2008 and 2012 but represented only 17–20 percent of those admitted.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/416473/smash-bamboo-ceiling-racial-quotas-john-fund

[Bigot for the Left wants to discriminate against Asian Americans]
3/31/15 Brooklyn Magazine: “Only Ten Black Students Were Offered a Spot at Stuyvesant High School This Year, But Is This Really a Problem?”
by Kristin Iversen
This year, the specialized high school’s incoming freshman class will contain 5% black students and 7% Latino students, despite the fact that blacks and Latinos make up approximately 70% of the public school student population as a whole. As a comparison, 52% of the class will be Asian and 28% will be white, even though both groups together comprise just under 30% of the public school population. On the surface of things, at least, this seems to be a huge problem, one that Mayor de Blasio and School Chancellor Fariña are trying to change by changing the criteria for admission to these schools, with de Blasio saying last year, “We cannot have a dynamic where some of our greatest educational options are only available to people from certain backgrounds.”

3/30/15 Modern Luxury: “The Dragon and the Dome: How a ghettoized minority cracked the San Francisco establishment—and then became it.”
by Chris A. Smith
Once well outside the political mainstream, the Chinese-American community has become an electoral powerhouse, able to provide friendly candidates—increasingly Chinese-American themselves—with votes, money, and small armies of campaign workers. Ed Lee’s election in 2011 as the city’s first Asian-American mayor is just the most obvious example. Chinese Americans currently hold 3 of 11 seats on the city’s Board of Supervisors, both of San Francisco’s state assembly seats, and a host of other positions, from the local school board to the state controller’s office.http://www.modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/the-dragon-and-the-dome

3/30/15 NBC News: “National Rallies Planned for Indicted NYPD Officer Peter Liang”
BY Chris Fuchs
Supporters of Peter Liang, the rookie Chinese-American New York City police officer indicted in the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man in Brooklyn, are planning rallies across the country next month to raise awareness for what they believe is an unjust and politically motivated prosecution.
“If it was not for Ferguson and not for Staten Island, Peter Liang might not have been indicted,” said Doug Lee, co-chairperson of the Coalition of Asian-Americans for Civil Rights, referring to incidents last year in which white officers were not indicted in the deaths of unarmed black men.http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/national-rallies-planned-indicted-nypd-officer-peter-liang-n332511

3/29/15 Los Angeles Times: “Recent election gains show Asian American voters’ power surge”
By Cathleen Decker
From his new perch in Washington, Ted Lieu has suffered through an East Coast winter and other confounding indignities of life as a freshman member of the House from the party out of power. No matter, he says; he learned from his predecessor, the 40-year member Henry Waxman, that influence will be marked in years and decades, not the three months Lieu has spent in the capital.
For one of Lieu’s bases of support, however, a far swifter assertion of power is underway. The Torrance Democrat’s victory in November’s election was only one sign of the surge in importance of Asian American voters and Asian American politicians.http://www.latimes.com/local/politics/la-me-pol-california-politics-20150329-story.html

3/25/15 thinkprogress.org: “How Asian American Women Are Forgotten In The Tech Diversity Debate”
by Sharon H. Chang
Three Asian American women are putting prominent tech companies on the hot seat, charging they faced discrimination at work over their gender and race. The slew of lawsuits has shone a light on what appears to be a blind spot in the debates surrounding Silicon Valley’s diversity problem: how Asian women often fall through the cracks.

3/16/15 Los Angeles Times: “Chinese immigrant, denied law license in 1890, gets one posthumously”
by Maura Dolan
Closing a chapter on the state’s history of anti-Chinese laws, the California Supreme Court decided unanimously Monday to give a posthumous law license to a Chinese immigrant whose race barred him from the state’s legal profession 125 years ago.http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-83070235/

3/10/15 Gotham Gazette: “Real Answers to Improve Diversity at the Specialized High Schools”
Critics of the Specialized High School Admissions Test as the sole criteria for admission to Brooklyn Tech, Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and five other schools continue to lament the low admissions rates of African-American and Latino students. While they do so, two remarkable developments occurred last week when the latest admission results were announced.
First, NYU’s Research Alliance for New York City Schools released a significant new research report.http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/research_alliance/publications/pathways_to_an_elite_education
It shows many of the changes being urged on elected policy makers – such as using state assessment test scores, grades, and attendance – either would result in little change in the admissions rates for these groups or would actually result in fewer black and more white students being offered admission.
The study states that the only way to make dramatic demographic change through altering the admissions criteria was to eliminate the test and substitute guaranteed admission to the top ten percent of students at each middle school. But it makes clear that this would come at the significant cost of lowering the academic preparation of the student body to do the rigorous coursework that make the specialized test-in schools the turbo-charged engines of advancement to the best colleges for the children of New York City’s working class, poor, and immigrant families. (Two-thirds of the city public school graduates attending Harvard, Princeton, or Yale graduate from only three high schools – Brooklyn Tech, Stuyvesant, and Bronx Science – where 50% of the combined student body qualifies for free or subsidized lunch, a measure of poverty.)http://www.gothamgazette.com/index.php/opinions/5622-real-answers-to-improve-diversity-at-the-specialized-high-schools-shsat-cary

3/2/15 Bloomberg: “Asians Make It Big in America”
By Cass R. Sunstein
From 1989 to 2013, the median wealth of white families stayed essentially constant, rising (in inflation-adjusted dollars) from $130,102 to $134,008. For Hispanic families, in contrast, the value grew significantly, but from a low starting point: $9,229 to $13,900. For African-American families, the story is similar: The median rose from $7,736 to $11,184.
The biggest advance by far was made by Asian-American families, who experienced an increase from $64,165 to $94,440 (including a significant spike since 2010). For most of the past two decades, their median income has been higher than that of whites, and if current trends continue, their median wealth will soon be higher, too.http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-03-02/why-asian-americans-will-soon-be-the-wealthiest-americans

2/23/15 Voice of America: “Rise of Asian-American Candidates Signals Possible Shift in US Politics”
by Dora Hasan Mekouar
A little noticed special election in Orange County, California gave the Board of Supervisors–the county’s governing body–an Asian-American majority for the first time, foreshadowing a possible political shift in California, the most populous state in the nation.

2/21/15 Los Angeles Times: “For Asian Americans, a changing landscape on college admissions”
By Frank Shyong
Asian Americans are learning to deal with diversity in the changing landscape of college admissions
In a windowless classroom at an Arcadia tutoring center, parents crammed into child-sized desks and dug through their pockets and purses for pens as Ann Lee launches a PowerPoint presentation.
Her primer on college admissions begins with the basics: application deadlines, the relative virtues of the SAT versus the ACT and how many Advanced Placement tests to take.
Then she eases into a potentially incendiary topic — one that many counselors like her have learned they cannot avoid.
“Let’s talk about Asians,” she says.
Lee’s next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term “bonus” to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant’s race is worth. She points to the first column.
African Americans received a “bonus” of 230 points, Lee says.
She points to the second column.
“Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points.”
The last column draws gasps.
Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points — in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission.
“Do Asians need higher test scores? Is it harder for Asians to get into college? The answer is yes,” Lee says.http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-adv-asian-race-tutoring-20150222-story.html#page=1

2/14/15 The Tennessean: “Why Asian-Americans excel over others in education”
by Ming Wang
America faces many major challenges today, among them jobs, health care and education. In order to strengthen our nation, we have to improve in these areas particularly in education. At the time of the celebration of Chinese New Year (this is the “Year of the Sheep”), I am reminded of what a great job Asian-Americans have been doing in educating their children, and how the rest of America can learn from them.http://www.tennessean.com/story/opinion/contributors/2015/02/15/asian-americans-excel-education/23367177/

2/9/15 Townhall: “The Asian Diaspora From the GOP”
by Matt Vespa
The Republican share of the Asian vote has been on a precipitous decline since the 1992 presidential election, the last race the GOP nominee was able to garner the majority of the Asian vote. Since then, it’s been a race to the bottom in national elections. The low point came in 2012, when 73 percent of Asians casted their ballots for Barack Obama. It’s shocking given how Asians view hard work, the importance of family, and their meteoric rise in American society.http://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2015/02/09/the-asian-diaspora-from-the-gop-n1952925

1/19/15 The Hill: “The myth of the ‘Asian vote'”
By Anne Kim
Asians have also tripled their share of the electorate in recent years, from just 1 percent of voters in 1992 to 3 percent in 2014. And while they’ve tilted Democratic in the last few presidential contests, Asians voted Republican in 2014 (50 percent to 49 percent), putting them firmly into “swing” territory and leading The Daily Beast’s Tim Mak to proclaim Asian-Americans “the new Florida.”http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/campaign/229889-the-myth-of-the-asian-vote

1/8/15 Newsmax: “Both Parties Interested in Asian-American Voters”
By Joel Himelfarb
Asian-Americans could become a lucrative political target for Republicans and Democrats in the coming years, given their population growth and political flexibility, the Daily Beast reported Thursday.
Since the early 1990s, Asian-Americans have trended sharply toward the Democrats in presidential elections. In 1992, Republican George H.W. Bush won the Asian-American vote by 24 points in his unsuccessful bid for re-election. But 20 years later, Barack Obama carried the Asian vote by 47 percentage points in winning a second term in the White House — a 71-point swing in the Democrats’ favor.http://www.newsmax.com/Politics/Democrats-Republicans-Asian-American-voters/2015/01/08/id/617321/